Daniel Flavin was a key figure of the minimalist art movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. The term was first coined by philosopher Richard Wollheim in his 1965 essay “Minimal Art” to categorize works that, like Duchamp's ready-mades, did not seek to represent an external reality; instead, the exhibited object was to be understood as a work in its own right, and the viewer's experience was not meant to rely on external associations.
A contemporary of Donald Judd and Robert Morris, Flavin began his career with drawing and painting within the context of Abstract Expressionism. In the early 1960s, he experimented with combining simple forms and light, eventually working exclusively with fluorescent tubes. In 1963, Flavin created the installation “Diagonal,” in which a single yellow fluorescent tube is positioned at a 45-degree angle to the floor.
