Daniel Buren

11 March 2021

Significant for Daniel Buren (* 1938), the French master of Minimal Art, is the use of stripes in his works of art, namely 8.7 cm wide white stripes that always run vertically and often alternate with colored stripes. He developed this formative principle for his works as early as the mid-1960s. It has no meaning by itself but rather works as a structure, a formal element.

Over decades, he has remained faithful to his stripe principle. While other artists might modify their forms, Buren instead changed the support medium. At the beginning he painted awning fabrics, however, he soon increased the range of materials employed. One case is legendary 1969 exhibition When Attidudes Become Form curated by Harald Szeeman at Kunsthalle Bern, for which Buren printed on billboards. Today, Buren works mostly in situ and installs his stripes in public buildings (e.g. museums) oder in architectures, as well as in public space. The most renowned example is the court of the Palais Royal in Paris, which he transformed in 1986 with his installation Les Deux Plateaux made of rows of striped columns.

There, where he does not find any pre-exisiting architecture, he builds it himself, creating spaces ex novo, as in his series’ Cabanes. Burens artistic ideas are in the foreground. Usually, they are realized by employees or teams of the museum where the exhibition takes place.

Among his most famous exhibitions are the manifold participations to documenta Kassel in 1972, 1977 and 1982. In 1986 he represented France at the Venice Biennial, obtaining the Golden Lion. In 1987 he took part in the Skulptur Projekte Münster with the work Tor. Buren’s great retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York happened in 2005, followed by the Praemium Imperiale award, granted by the Japanese Emperor, two years later. Lastly, in 2012 he transformed the Paris’ Grand Palais with the exhibition series Monumenta in a rupture of colours bearing the title Exentrique(s).