CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.- The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, presents Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, the first comprehensive exhibition of Flavin's full career, from July 2 through October 30, 2005, including the re-creation of the 1967 alternating pink and “gold” room exclusively for the MCA presentation. For more than three decades, Dan Flavin (1933-1996) vigorously pursued the artistic possibilities of fluorescent light. The artist radically limited his materials to commercially-available fluorescent tubing in standard sizes, shapes, and colors, removing everyday hardware from its utilitarian context and inserting it into the world of high art. The resulting body of work at once possesses a straightforward simplicity and a deep sophistication.

In 1967, the first year the MCA opened its doors, the museum presented Dan Flavin’s first solo museum exhibition where Flavin created a single work consisting of fifty-four eight-foot pink and yellow fixtures. At the time, alternating pink and “gold” was the largest of Flavin’s work. Deceptively simple, two colors of fluorescent lamps were alternatively mounted and progressively spaced in a repeated sequence across each of the gallery’s walls. Flavin described it as “a broad, bright, gaudy-vulgar system for the museum.” This installation is reproduced in its entirety in the north gallery on the fourth floor of the exhibition.

The exhibition features more than 50 objects and installations, which use the medium of fluorescent light, along with more than 100 drawings, sketches, and collage-constructions. Dan Flavin: A Retrospective showcases the chronological development of Flavin's work over the course of 35 years, demonstrating how he experimented with light, color, and interior space. It includes the full range of his work, from the early "icons" to installations that occupy an entire room. Many of these are specifically dedicated by Flavin to modernist predecessors and contemporary artists whom he admired, such as Constantin Brancusi, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Alexander Calder, and Donald Judd. Other dedications reveal Flavin's commitment to the politics of his time and his attempt to reinvent the genre of the commemorative monument.

One of Flavin's signature "barrier" works, untitled (to you, Heiner, with admiration and affection) (1973), a 120-foot-long installation in green fluorescent light, is installed near the windows of the museum’s fourth-floor galleries and is illuminated 24 hours a day during the run of the exhibition. The exhibition includes a group of "icons," produced between 1961 and 1963, a series of box-like constructions with attached incandescent and fluorescent lights. Works such as icon V (Coran's Broadway flesh) (1962) signify Flavin's invention of an object that is neither painting nor sculpture yet incorporates elements of both.

Another section of the exhibition represents Flavin's move from the "icon" constructions into works composed solely of fluorescent light. Flavin's use of standardized tubes that were available from hardware stores in prefabricated lengths and colors begins with the work the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi) (1963). A group of Flavin's well-known "monuments" to V. Tatlin (1964–1981) comprise the chief example of the principle of seriality and permutation in his work. The range of Flavin's content is represented by works that include political subjects, such as monument 4 those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death) (1966), an installation in red light that references the Vietnam War. In other works, Flavin shows respectful, slightly humorous homages to fellow artists such as Ad Reinhardt, in a work consisting only of ultraviolet (or "black") light, which refers to Reinhardt’s famous black paintings.

The exhibition also includes a large selection of works on paper (portraits, landscapes, and collages, as well as plans and diagrams) which reveal both practical and conceptual aspects of Flavin's working process. Organized by the Dia Art Foundation in association with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, is curated by Michael Govan, Dia Art Foundation director and president, and Tiffany Bell, director of the Dan Flavin catalogue raisonné project. The MCA's presentation is coordinated by James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs Elizabeth Smith.