From sex shops to swanky galleries: how neon art became red-hot

For William Blake, etching was “the infernal method” of making art, since it involved burning an image onto a copper plate with corrosive substances. He meant “infernal” as a compliment. Had he lived a century later, you suspect he would have had a lot of fun working with neon.

The gas was discovered in 1898 by William Ramsay and Morris Travers at University College London. Fourteen years later, the first neon sign appeared, adorning a hairdresser’s shop in Paris, and they soon became a byword for consumerist fantasies. In the century since, they have adorned everything from sex shops to theatres, and become indelibly linked in the popular imagination with the seediest corners of Soho, Las Vegas strip-clubs and film noir. Sex sold, and neon sold it. Beyond the red-light districts, it might appear in more polite form on billboards or shopfronts – but it has always been trying to grab the attention of passers-by in order to peddle them something.

To make a neon piece, you first have to melt glass tubes beneath a hot flame. Once twisted into shape, they’re fitted with a high-voltage transformer and a vacuum pump: the air inside the tube conducts electricity produced by the transformer, with the resultant heat burning off impurities that are extracted by the vacuum. Neon gas is then introduced into the tube, illuminated with its distinctive crimson glow by the electrical current. (You can use argon and mercury, instead, for an electric blue – or add fluorescent powders in the tube to produce other hues.) It takes at least seven years for an apprentice signmaker to learn their craft. As Yana Ryan, of Neon Specialists on the Hackney Road in east London, tells me, even for the experts there is a one-in-10 chance that the design you’ve painstakingly crafted will collapse under pressure, and you’ll have to start all over again.

When Neon Specialists was established in Spitalfields back in the late 1980s, by Kerry Ryan, Yana’s father, his primary client-base was restaurateurs in Brick Lane. But, by chance, this era would also see the YBAs establish themselves in east London, and one by one, seduced by neon’s strange allure, those artists began to seek Ryan out. 

Cerith Wyn Evans was the first to come into his shop, swiftly followed by Tracey Emin, who before long was delivering her cryptically confessional slogans on napkins for Ryan to turn into signs – works such as Fantastic to Feel Beautiful Again (1997), or Be Faithful to Your Dreams (1998). “I was in the right place at the right time,” says Ryan, who was paid partly in artworks for his services. His business is today the go-to for fine-art neon-making in London. (As with all works of art that require considerable artisanal knowhow, artists now are more likely to present their ideas to expert fabricators than to attempt the process themselves.)

Today, neon is a mainstream fine-art form. In London, for instance, one such work by Emin – which greets Eurostar travellers with the words “I want my time with you”, scrawled out over 20 metres and glowing in her signature hot pink – has seemingly become a permanent public installation. In Walthamstow, God’s Own Junkyard – established in the 1980s by the late Chris Bracey, who created signs for everything from Soho sex shops to Hollywood films – has made its name as an emporium of kitsch and sleaze, but has also produced works for the likes of Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed. 

The Los Angeles-based painter Mary Weatherford has recently employed neon as a means of recreating Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas, while Welsh artist Bethan Huws’s ongoing show at Thomas Schulte in Germany presents an array of monstrous figures adapted from Romanesque bas-reliefs, recreated with glowing neon tubes, and across town in Berlin, the American artist James Turrell has created a permanent light installation in the memorial chapel of Dorotheenstadt cemetery, which changes hue in harmony with the setting sun.

But the use of fluorescent light in art has a longer pedigree. Bruce Nauman began making written slogans into neon signs in the 1960s: The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967), realised in a glowing cursive swirl, pricks the inherent pompousness of the words by playing on neon’s kitschy connotations – a gambit typical of Nauman. Lucio Fontana’s “environments” of the 1960s, meanwhile, created abstract neon swirls. And similarly, by the early 1970s Dan Flavin was using fluorescent light fixtures to produce what he called “situations”. Though Flavin didn’t technically use neon, rather commercially available light fixtures, he’s considered a pioneer of light art, and his work shows how fluorescent light can run the gamut from profane to sacred, or from impudent satire à la Nauman to high seriousness.

A recreation of one major Flavin exhibition of 1973, titled colored fluorescent light, goes on display at David Zwirner in London this month. Curator Kristine Bell explains that Flavin wanted to “take the handmade out of the equation” – this was the era when Abstract Expressionism reigned supreme – and instead use a “palette” of nine colours (including four kinds of white) to shape a viewer’s response to their architectural environment. His “situations” are coolly dispassionate, but none the less beautiful.

Yet where Flavin wanted to hide the artist’s hand, others have sought to celebrate the profoundly handmade nature of neon. It seems peculiar that a form so associated both with the mechanical age and with consumerist kitsch should be the result of such painstaking craftsmanship – an oddity that Douglas Gordon, another YBA graduate, brings to the fore in his current show, Neon Ark, at Gagosian in London. For this show, Neon Specialists (who else?) conducted a live workshop at Gagosian’s gallery in Davies Street – “a special street for special people wanting special kinds of things, none of which are really related to work”, Gordon tells me. In the workshop, Yana Ryan and colleagues set out to make all of the neon signs included in the show in real time – and in full public view. Mayfair window-shoppers were confronted with the neon-making process in all its dangerous glory.

Gordon was first turned on to neon because he saw it being made in a workshop on an industrial estate in Glasgow in the late 1980s. His first work in the medium read “Faust 1224–1237” – a reference to the passage of Goethe’s play that mulls over the opening of the Gospel of John (“In the beginning was the Word”) – and it was made by the same “very old” craftsman he had first encountered. After it was shown at Glasgow’s Transmission gallery, he says, it followed him home, where he adds that “it was fantastic to make love beneath”. For Gordon, the “devilish” side of neon is a large part of its charm.

At Neon Specialists, the pride the Ryans take in their craft is obvious. Pointing to one sign, Yana talks to me of the “natural patina of the glass” – a term one might normally associate more with a Giambologna bronze than the object to which she’s pointing, namely a kitschy image of Ariel from The Little Mermaid. (Emin, Yana says, likes watching the ways that the glass degrades as her neons grow old.)

Kerry Ryan himself is something of a neon connoisseur, and can tell you about every new shopfront or theatre in London where an old neon sign has been removed, or – more happily – a new one has gone up. He’s currently setting up a training workshop in Miami for new apprentices in the craft, with its own neon gallery and a “licensed venue”. Ryan is looking forward to “parties all the time”, but he’s also hoping to find the next generation of those who’ve “got the gift” for the work. Where does he think the enduring appeal of neon comes from? “It just lights up the street,” he says. “Everyone loves neon – especially if you’re a little bit nocturnal.”

Douglas Gordon: Neon Ark is at Gagosian Davies Street, London W1 until Jan 14; info: gagosian.com. Dan Flavin: colored fluorescent light is at David Zwirner, London W1 from Jan 12 until Feb 18; info: davidzwirner.com. God’s Own Junkyard is open at weekends: godsownjunkyard.co.uk