Biography
Daniel Buren was born in Boulogne-Billancourt in 1938.
In 1958 he studies at “L’École Nationale des Arts et Métiers“. He specialised himself in decoration and painting.
Since 1960, he became to research the link between creation and minimalism, and between form and content. The dichotomy between the work of artand the space around it is also a topic of his relfexion.
In 1965, he begans to use the fabric of homes’ roller striped blinds. The colored stripes are spaced 8,7 cm. How to rich the Impersonnal creating a work ? Daniel Buren gives an answer to this question by using the space of 8,7 cm in his works of art.
In 1967, at the 18th Fair of Young Painting in Paris, with Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier et Niele Toroni, he is a member of the B.M.P.T. group. These artists had chosen to realize their impersonal and minimalist works during the exhibition itself. At the end of 1967, they decided not to go futher together as a group.
Buren became to make research about the notion of the environment of a work of art, its place in public or private places, and the link between the environment and the work. He creates the notion of the “in situ work” : the public or private place which hosts the work becames a part of the work, is complementary to the work of art…. and the work is also created for this place, as a part of the place chosen for the installation.
From that point he can have a reflection about the new perception of the place thanks to the work of art hosted by this place.
Daniel Buren plays with his famous stripes and with the genres : painting, sculpture, performance, his “schémas” aim at revealing a place and its structure, thanks to light and all the “points de vue” allowed by his intallations.
His most famous masterpiece is “Les Deux Plateaux“, realized in 1986 in the Court of the Palais Royal in Paris, better known as the “Buren’s columns“. The striped columns are spaced 8,7 cm.
Daniel Buren has been also invited to the Monumenta at the Grand Palais in 2012, et has decorated the Franck Gherry‘s architecture of the Fondation Vuitton in 2016 with his « Observatoire de la lumière ».
