Going for a Walk in a Zigzag

Daniel Buren was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France (1938), where he lives and works.

Daniel Buren has punctuated the past 50 years of art with unforgettable interventions, controversial critical texts, thought-provoking public art projects and engaging collaborations with artists from different generations. Throughout his career Buren has created artworks that complicate the relationship between art and the structures that frame it. In the early 1960s, he developed a radical form of Conceptual Art, a “degree zero of painting” as he called it, which played simultaneously on an economy of means and the relationship between the support and the medium. In 1965 he began using his 8.7cm-wide vertical stripes as the starting point for research into what painting is, how it is presented, and more broadly, the physical and social environment in which an artist works. All of Buren’s interventions are created in situ, borrowing and colouring the spaces in which they are presented. They are critical tools addressing questions of how we look and perceive, and the way space can be used, appropriated, and revealed in its social and physical nature. In his work life finds its way into art, while autonomous art is able to reconnect with life.

His work has been the subject of major exhibitions at Museo de Arte Italiano, Lima, Peru (2019); Carriageworks, Redfern, Australia (2018); Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, OH, USA (2018); Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany (2018); Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Dusseldorf, Germany (2017); Centre Pompidou Málaga, Málaga, Spain (2017); BOZAR Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium (2016); Museo – Espacio, Aguascalientes, Mexico (2016); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2014); Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, France (2014); Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2013); the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA (2005) and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2002). Buren has exhibited in the Venice Biennale, Italy more than ten times and was awarded the Golden Lion for his French Pavilion in 1986. That same year, he produced his first and most controversial public commission, The Two Plateaux, for the main courtyard of the Palais-Royal in Paris, France. In 2007, he received the Praemium Imperiale for Painting from Japan. Most recently, he was selected for the site specific Monumenta 2012 commission at the Grand Palais in Paris, France. Buren’s 1994 installation The Arches, permanent work in situ, is on view at the Southampton City Art Gallery, and in May 2017, he launched another permanent installation in the UK – Diamonds and Circles, works in situ – at Tottenham Court Road station in London, commissioned by Art on the Underground.