Zwirner, New York, January 15—February 21, 2026
Dan Flavin at David Zwirner is often the rare “big-name light show” that is actually about looking, not just bathing in color for the selfies. This one, titled Dan Flavin: Grids, is a tight, historically specific presentation: it focuses on Flavin’s “grid” constructions, a body of work he began in 1976. Zwirner frames it as the first focused examination of that format.
The gallery’s stated premise is also unusually specific: several installations are “re-creations” of how Flavin installed the grids in significant lifetime exhibitions, with loans from public collections and the Estate. That matters because Flavin’s work is not just “light in a room.” It is light behaving against a particular corner, a particular wall height, a particular ceiling condition. In other words: architecture, but with fluorescent tubes doing the drawing.
Flavin’s grids are a special subset of his practice because they push past the clean one-liner summary of him as the artist of commercially available fluorescent lamps. In the exhibition text, curator Michael Govan is quoted calling the grids “among the most intense and concentrated” of Flavin’s lights. The reason is structural: the grids pair an equal number of vertical fixtures facing backward with horizontal fixtures facing forward, in varying color combinations. You end up with a work that broadcasts outward to you while also pumping color into the corner itself, so the room becomes a mixing chamber.