Transforming color into light is one of the great themes of painting. Dan Flavin (1933-1996) used light as color and material. Employing ordinary neon light tubes, he developed a radical new form of art that freed the "painting" from its framework and turned it into a luminous color object with a threedimensional appearance. Expanding the wall painting by turning it into a light installation corresponded with the liberation of light from its traditionally spiritual meanings. Flavin's works recall neon signs from urban nightlife or banal living room lamps. The viewer finds himself immersed in a splendid play of light and color that allows a physical experience of an unlimited kind of art. This publication discusses how the painted objects, the so-called Icons, eventually developed into the three-dimensional neon tubes, and uses examples of drawings and prints-which, as an independent group of works, testify to Flavin's visual sensibility