Daniel Buren

For over fifty years, Daniel Buren has marked contemporary art with striking interventions, provocative critical texts, ambitious public projects and collaborations across generations. His practice consistently examines the relationship between art and the structures that frame it. In the early 1960s, he developed what he termed a “degree zero of painting”: a radical form of Conceptual Art that combined an economy of means with a focus on the relationship between support and medium. From 1965, Buren adopted his signature 8.7 cm-wide vertical stripes as a tool to investigate the nature of painting, its modes of display, and the broader physical and social contexts of artistic production. All his works are conceived in situ, borrowing and colouring the spaces they inhabit. Functioning as critical instruments, they probe how we look and perceive, and how space may be used, appropriated and revealed in its physical and social dimensions. In Buren’s art, life permeates artistic practice, while autonomous art re-establishes its connection with life.