Dan Flavin from the Luigi e Peppino Agrati Collection

The Gallerie d’ltalia present an important corpus of works by Dan Flavin belonging to the Luigi and Peppino Agrati Collection which, thanks to the bequest of Cavalier Luigi Agrati, has become part of the historical-artistic heritage protected and promoted by lntesa Sanpaolo.

Like Donald Judd, Cari Andre and Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin is one of the main exponents of American Minimal Art, which tends to simplify artforms to the point of making them geometric elements, in reaction to the emotional charge of Post-World War II Abstract Expressionism and that of the 1950s and Pop Art, with its reflection on consumer society and the world of entertainment.

Commencing in 1963, Flavin chose to use fluorescent lights as elements of his own personal visual language. One or more lights, in one or more standard colours and sizes, identical or linked by modular proportions, are arranged in a space, configuring installations that change the luminosity and colour of the environment: there is no content-based or symbolic reference, just a purely objective afiirmation of the materials and their organisation. The artist describes his work as a “sequence of implicit decisions to combine the traditions of painting and sculpture in architecture, with acts of electric light that define space” (D. Flavin, 1965).

Peppino Agrati was one of the first European collectors to realise Flavin’s importance: in 1969 he purchased the first work, Untitled (to Giuseppe Agrati), a piece created in 1968 with a highly articulated configuration of lights, with dimensions corresponding to a modular progression; he bought four more between 1970 and 1980: Untitled (to Brad Gillaugh), Untitled (to Ileana and Michael Sonnabend), Untitled (to Giuseppe Agrati) and Untitled (to Mr. Giuseppe Agrati), all created by 1970.