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Paris · 18/10/2026

Dan Flavin: European Couples

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Dan Flavin: European Couples

Gagosian presents European Couples, an exhibition bringing together all nine fluorescent corner works from Dan Flavin’s European Couples series (1966–71) at its Le Bourget gallery. Shown in their entirety for only the third time – and for the first time in France – these “situations”, as Flavin called them, offer a rare chance to experience the series as a single installation and to reflect on the relationships between colour, seriality, architecture and the dedications in the works’ titles. Five works lent by the Estate of Dan Flavin join four from the collection of Heiner Friedrich, following the series’ long-term presentation at DASMAXIMUM KunstGegenwart, the private museum Friedrich founded in Traunreut, Germany, in 2011, which closed in 2024. The series grows out of Flavin’s relationships and his long-standing habit of dedicating works to people he knew or worked with – artists, electricians and gallery staff as well as friends and family. Heiner Friedrich occupies a special place among them. An influential German art dealer in the 1960s and ’70s, he became a lifelong champion of a number of artists, working closely with Flavin from the late 1960s and showing his work at his galleries in Munich, Cologne and New York. In 1974 Friedrich co-founded the Dia Art Foundation, which opened the Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton, New York, in 1983 (today Dia Bridgehampton). Decades later he launched DASMAXIMUM, an unconventional museum housed in a former industrial complex and conceived as a place where substantial groups of works by selected artists could remain on view for long periods. Flavin began European Couples in 1966, only three years after abandoning painting and collage for light works made from industrially produced fluorescent tubes and fixtures. Each work in the series is an eight-foot (244 cm) open square in a single colour of fluorescent light – yellow, pink, red, blue, green, warm white, cool white, daylight or soft white – installed across a corner. The repetition of the same geometric form underlines Flavin’s interest in serial configurations, while the placement of the works transforms and activates the architecture itself, as light spills across the adjoining walls and floor.

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