Background
Daniel Buren was born on March 25, 1938 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France.
2014
Daniel Buren in 2014.
63 Rue Olivier de Serres, 75015 Paris, France
In 1960, Daniel graduated from the École nationale supérieure des arts appliqués et des métiers d'art.
Daniel Buren and his installation at Tottenham Court Road tube station.
Daniel Buren outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Daniel Buren was born on March 25, 1938 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France.
In 1960, Daniel graduated from the École nationale supérieure des arts appliqués et des métiers d'art.
Daniel began painting in the early 1960's. In 1965, he spent a year on Saint Croix, an island in the Caribbean, where he had been commissioned to produce frescoes for the Grapetree Bay Hotel. At that time, Buren abandoned traditional figurative or abstract painting in favor of creating the work, composed of 8.7 cm-wide vertical stripes in white and one more color. This has been the main compositional component of almost all his work from that moment on.
Also, in 1965, Daniel started to gain prominence in Paris — this year, he received several prestigious awards, including Grand Prix at the Paris Biennale and the Prix Lefranc de la Jeune Peinture (prize for young painters). Soon after that, the artist began his collaboration with Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni. Together, the four painters formed the group BMPT, whose aim was to disrupt and challenge traditional notions of authorship and exhibition. They also sought to produce paintings, that were without extrinsic meaning or art historical references, focusing on the works' objecthood as paintings and attempting to eradicate the mystique and aura of art.
In 1968, Daniel's first important solo exhibition was held at Galleria Apollinaire in Milan. During that show, the artist blocked the entrance to the gallery with his stripes. The same year, Buren participated in the influential student demonstrations in Paris, sharing the protestors' anti-establishment feelings.
In 1969, Buren wanted to take part in Harald Szeemann's exhibition "When Attitudes Become Form", in Bern, but he wasn't invited. However, he was offered some space for his works, but he instead started to cover billboards in the city with his stripes. After that, the artist was arrested and had to leave Switzerland. A lawyer friend then helped secure Buren's release on the condition, that he removed all of the pasted up stripes from the city, however he fled Switzerland without doing this, and eventually the case was dropped.
In 1971, Daniel was invited to participate in a group show at the Guggenheim, which was intended to allow artists to explore unconventional aspects of the building. For the show, Buren produced a large banner, which was placed in the central space of the museum. However, artists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin asked for the work to be removed, because it obscured their own pieces, as they stated. As a result, Daniel's work was removed the day before the exhibition's opening.
During the 1970's, Daniel produced lots of works and also collaborated with other artists on some performance pieces. In the 1980's, the artist concentrated on the creation of large-scale installations in public spaces. The most notable of these included his work "Les Deux Plateaux", which the artist made in 1986 in the courtyard of the Palais Royal in Paris. The same year, Buren exhibited a solo pavilion for France at the Venice Biennale, and was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion Award for his installation.
Buren's later period was characterized by a series of permanent installations. Also, In 2007, he curated a selection of work by the younger installation, performance and conceptual artist, Sophie Calle, for the French pavilion, at the Venice Biennale. In 2017, Daniel produced a permanent site-specific installation in Tottenham Court Road London Underground station.
Moreover, during his lifetime, the artist has held many solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, among others institutions. Today, he works and lives in Paris, France.
Sur les Murs
Peinture suspendue [Acte II]
Photo-souvenir: Westwind (Vent d’ouest), travail situé
Photo-souvenir: Monochrome électrique – Bleu B2 & Vert B3, travail situé
Reflets n°33 - Peinture sur plexiglas 1/2, travail situé
Photo-souvenir: 1 carré = 1 cercle + 4 triangles, Hauts-reliefs situés H, travail situé
Photo-souvenir: Three light boxes for one wall
Double Rhythm
Papiers collés blanc et vert
Les Deux Plateaux (Colonnes de Buren)
Daniel believes, that viewers' encounters with forms, shapes and color, could be more meaningful, than encounters with naturalistic or semiotic images.
Quotations:
"Every act is political and, whether one is conscious of it or not, the presentation of one's work is no exception. Any production, any work of art is social, has a political significance. We are obliged to pass over the sociological aspect of the proposition before us due to lack of space and consideration of priority among the questions to be analyzed."
"The work of art... in seemingly by-passing all difficulties, attains full freedom, thus in fact nourishing the prevailing ideology. It functions as a security valve for the system, an image of freedom in the midst of general alienation and finally as a bourgeois concept supposedly beyond all criticism, natural, above and beyond all ideology."
"Every place radically imbues (formally, architecturally, sociologically, politically) with its meaning the object (work creation) shown there."
"When we say architecture, we include the social, political and economic context. Architecture of any sort is in fact the inevitable background, support and frame of any work."
"Putting a shovel in a gallery or museum signified "this shovel has become art". And it actually was. The action itself is art, because the artist projects himself in choosing the shovel, and especially in placing it out of context."
Daniel is a very private person, who prefers to keep the information about his personal life in secret.