Daniel Buren (1938)
France
Biography :
"Born in 1938 in Boulogne-Billancourt (France)
Lives and works on site
Daniel Buren is today one of the most recognized French artists on the international scene. He is at the origin of the concept of the in situ work, the principle of which underlines the importance of the context of the work of art and tends to transform the site where it takes place. Daniel Buren has also left his mark on the town planning of large cities around the world, with his famous motif of
Alternating “bands” of color, 8.7 cm wide, which have become the artist’s signature. Responding to numerous public commissions, Daniel Buren intervenes in the museum space (at the Guggenheim Museum in New York) or in the public space (courtyard of honor of the Palais Royal in Paris). In 2012, Buren was invited for Monumenta at the Grand Palais, he took over the Nave with a colorful work designed for the occasion. In 2014-2015, he exhibited at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg. Entitled Like Child's Play, and also presented at the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea DonnaREgina (MADRE) in Naples, this exhibition highlights his work on color, like a construction game made of geometric shapes that invade the space. Daniel Buren presents the exhibition Axer / Désaxer at this same institution in Naples. In situ work in 2017. At the end of 2017, he presented the exhibition Projections / Rétroprojections. On-site work at the Center Pompidou Málaga (Spain). In 2018-2019, he continued various on-site work projects around the world (Peru, Mexico, Korea, Cuba, Australia, Morocco, etc.).
The artist very precisely defined his positions through numerous texts republished in Écrits 1965-2012, published in 2013 by Flammarion/CNAP, Paris.
At the beginning of the 1960s, Daniel Buren painted on colored bed sheets or on burlap, after having produced numerous collages and paintings on paper and canvas. In 1965 he adopted a striped fabric made up of equal stripes, alternately white and colored. He then painted “paintings with variable shapes” on this support. At the same time, he founded the BMPT group, with Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni. The group will organize four events which affirm their critical position in relation to painting, in other words a desire to reduce painting to its "zero degree" by working on formal repetition to bring out the importance of the place where the work is 'registered.
From then on, Daniel Buren no longer considers the exhibition frame as a neutral receptacle and a work as an object, but as an arrangement of properties. He thus moves from painting as an end to painting as a means, definitively adopting a plastic sign, the strips, which he calls a “visual tool”. This will invariably consist of the chromatic alternation of white bands and colored bands, and with a width set in 1967 at 8.7 cm.
The artist works without a studio, since he carries out works “in situ”, that is to say in the very places for which they are intended. Daniel Buren's visual tool has the role of revealing, through its placement, the characteristics of the places he invests. The in situ work also tends, therefore, to transform the place where it takes place. It becomes obvious that the work of art is not autonomous from its place of reception and that the role played by the context must be emphasized.
In 1980, Daniel Buren invested public space, through statuary in Lyon with the Ponctuations project, statue/sculpture, but it was in 1986 that he carried out his first public commission: Les Deux Plateaux, in the courtyard of honor of the Palais Royal in Paris. The work therefore becomes a place within which the viewer can wander and adopt various points of view on the surrounding space.
Furthermore, the Cabanes explodes have run through the artist's work since 1975 and they constitute a sort of meeting point for recurring elements in his work: relationships between architecture and work, work with light and color, play on materials, relationship of the viewer with the work, status of the work... Their form has evolved over the years and generated increasingly playful and sophisticated spaces. The spectator is encouraged to enter inside the cabins and discover varied points of view and perspectives, sometimes to the point of wandering in a sort of kaleidoscope and playing with his gaze and his movement with the constructions all made of mirrors, lights and colors."
(Source, website, Contemporary art institute of Villeurbanne)