Few artists have defined a particular medium as Dan Flavin, whose pioneering work from the early 1960s until his death in 1996 almost entirely consisted of light in the form of commercially available fluorescent tubes. untitled (to Bob and Pat Rohm), 1969-1970, is an important early work that perfectly encapsulates Flavin’s groundbreaking innovations. Dedicated to Flavin’s friends Bob Rohm, an artist, and his wife Pat Rohm, the present work is the sister work to the 8-foot version that Flavin created the year prior. It is testimony to the significance of the series that Flavin gifted an edition of the first example to his close friend and fellow artist Donald Judd. More housable than the first iteration, the present work consists of a 4-foot window-like structure that hovers mid-air within a corner – drawing the viewer into a suffused space of pure light and color. While Flavin conceived of this work in an edition of five, only three were fabricated, with one edition notably residing in the collection of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

untitled (to Bob and Pat Rohm) was created six years after Flavin achieved his artistic breakthrough of employing the industrial readymade to create installations of light and color, or “situations,” as he preferred to call them. Striving to strip art from its reliance on illusionism, allegory, and narrative, and reduce it to its most essential form, Flavin conceived of the groundbreaking idea to make sculptures incorporating electric light in 1960. Within the course of just three years, he gave form to this idea by initially juxtaposing light onto monochromatic canvas and then radically removing the canvas altogether with his seminal May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi). Despite Flavin's deep awareness of the historical and religious symbolism of light in art and his often personal dedication of his untitled works, he resolutely re-fused to attach any symbolic or narrative significance to his work. In this he was importantly joined by his close friend Donald Judd, with whom Flavin became known as one of the progenitors of “Minimal Art”, the term coined by Richard Wollheim in 1965 to describe this new tendency, though Flavin and his colleagues opposed this label.

untitled (to Bob and Pat Rohm) epitomizes Flavin’s favored construction for what he called the “near squares placed across a corner” (Dan Flavin, quoted in Michael Govan and Tiffany Bell, Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights 1961-1996, New York, 2004, p. 255). It has two yellow and green vertical 4-foot lamps on each side that face into the corner, and two horizontal red 4-foot lamps facing out. In doing so, Flavin has effectively created a frame-like structure with a sly nod to the discourse regarding the pictorial space inside a frame, and the real space of Minimalist sculpture. Drawing the viewer in with its suffused fluorescent glow that shimmers in red, green and yellow, untitled (to Bob and Pat Rohm) beautifully epitomizes Flavin’s pioneering phenomenological investigation of color and light that would forever alter the course of art making.