Dan Flavin New Light Jeffrey Weiss, Briony Fer, Hal Foster, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Alex Potts, Anne Wagner

In making light his primary medium, Dan Flavin (1933-1996) established himself as one of the most innovative and significant artists of the minimalist movement. A new generation encountered Flavin's work through the critically acclaimed exhibition Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, which opened in October 2004 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. "Dan Flavin: New Light" includes essays that respond to this exhibition and to the renewed interest in Flavin's work and its place in 20th-century art. In this volume, six leading scholars of contemporary art consider the ambiguities and multiple resonances of Flavin's light works. Each addresses the ontological complexity of the work - object-based yet 'situational', and painterly in its deployment of coloured light - within the insistently sculptural world of minimalism. The book's contributors interpret this tension by exploring Flavin's early assemblages, the relationship of drawing to his installation practice, the specificity of his materials and their operation in actual space, and the openly ambivalent place of Flavin's work within the history of late modernism.

Jeffrey Weiss is Curator and Head of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Briony Fer is Reader in the History of Art at University College London. Hal Foster is Townsend Martin '17 Professor of Art and Archaeology and department chair at Princeton University. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, critic and painter, teaches in the graduate programme at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Alex Potts is Max Loehr Collegiate Professor of the History of Art and Chair of the Department of History of Art at the University of Michigan. Anne Wagner is Professor of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley.