The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opens Dan Flavin: Some Light on 11 November, a survey of the American artist's pioneering work with fluorescent light that runs until 4 April 2027. The show draws largely on the Guggenheim's own holdings from the Panza Collection, supplemented by key loans from the Dia Art Foundation in New York. The run, from 11 November to 4 April 2027, gives Bilbao audiences nearly five months with the work.

Flavin's breakthrough came in 1963, when he mounted a single gold fluorescent tube diagonally on a wall. A year later, his first solo exhibition composed entirely of fluorescent works opened at the Kaymar Gallery in New York. The Bilbao show takes that 1964 exhibition as its starting point, tracing how Flavin turned commercially available light fittings into an artistic medium.

Flavin conceived his arrangements as architectural situations rather than objects, deploying ready-made fixtures in controlled palettes of red, blue, green, pink, yellow, ultraviolet and white. Installed in the museum's Frank Gehry-designed galleries, the works bathe the rooms in coloured light, dissolving the boundary between sculpture and the space around it. The effect is closer to architecture than to sculpture: the visitor stands inside the work, not in front of it.

Among the works on view is greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green), made in 1966 and held in the Panza Collection. The exhibition is a reminder of how radical Flavin's economy of means still looks: no carved stone or cast bronze, just shop-bought tubes and the light they throw across a room.