Daniel Buren

Daniel Buren has been pursuing for fifty years a radical work thanks to a range of “visual tools” in minimal appearance but which engage the visitor in a profound metamorphosis of his perception: what he thought he knew is, by simple gestures but with multiple possibilities, as if turned on itself. The place becomes inseparable from the work that reveals its hidden dimensions, and the gaze suddenly sees “differently”. 

From the beginning of the 1960s, the artist developed a painting that plays on both the economy of the means used and the relationships between the background (support) and the form (painting). In 1965, while painting paintings that combine rounded shapes and bands of different sizes and colors, he chose to use an industrial fabric with alternating vertical stripes, white and colored.

Starting from the possibilities offered by this medium, he leads a reflection on painting, on its modes of presentation and, more broadly, on the physical and social environment in which the artist intervenes.

His works systematically question the place that welcomes them and for which they are designed: the street first, since 1967, then the gallery, the museum, the landscape or the architecture, which allows him to invent the term “in situ work” that characterizes, since, many of his interventions.

Incisive, critical, committed, the work of Daniel Buren, continually developed and diversified, always arouses comments, admiration and controversy.