Daniel Buren b. 1938

Born in Boulogne-Billancourt (Paris) in 1938, Daniel Buren lives and works in situ.

In the mid 60’s, Buren began to create paintings that radically questioned and explored the economy of the media used in his work and the relationship between background (support medium) and form (painting).

In 1965, when he was painting pictures that combined rounded forms and stripes varying in sizes and colours, he chose to use an industrial fabric with fixed vertical 8.7 cm-wide stripes alternating white with another colour. Beginning from this extremely simple and banal visual register, Buren further impoverished it by repeating it systematically to reach the grade of zero painting. This reflection will cause the observer’s attention to shift from the work to the physical and social environment within which the artist intervenes.

Eventually, he abandoned his studio in 1967, to favour work in situ, starting from the street, then the gallery, the museum, the landscape or the architecture.

His “visual tool” based on the use of the famous 8.7 cm alternating stripes let him reveal the significant details of the site where he is working, by employing them in specific, and at times complex, structures lying somewhere between painting, sculpture and architecture.

His in-situ works play with points of view, spaces, colours, light, movement, the surrounding environment, angles or projections, acquiring their decorative force by radically transforming the sites.

Incisive, critical and engaged, Buren’s work is in a continual state of development and diversification, and never fails to stimulate comment, admiration and disagreement. In 1986, he realized his most controversial public commission, today classified as a "historical monument" Les Deux Plateaux (The Two Plateaus), for the Courtyard of Honour of the Palais-Royal in Paris. In the same year, he represented France at the Venice Biennale, where he was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Pavilion.

In 2007, Daniel Buren received the Praemium Imperiale for Painting, awarded by the Emperor of Japan.