DANIEL BUREN

Daniel Buren is a world-renowned French conceptual artist whose work lies at the crossroads of sculpture, installation and painting, as well as action and intervention. He came to fame in Paris with the B.M.P.T. group (the initials of Buren, Mosset, Parmentier and Toroni) in 1966–1967 and continued to develop a critique of the art establishment. Buren appropriated a standard format fabric motif of 8.75 cm-wide vertical stripes (which alternate between white and a colour) as a visual instrument, or sign, to ‘expose’. He works on site, or in situ, in relation to the setting, a particular building and its story and context. Two examples that caused heated debate were Peinture-Sculpture at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, 1971 and the public commission Les Deux Plateaux (1986) at the Palais Royal in Paris. Throughout his career, he has documented all these events and grouped the images under the title Photo-souvenirs. Since the 1990s, his work has become increasingly architectural using fencing or grids, and stained glass window structures, such as his installation for Monumenta at the Grand Palais in Paris, 2012.