Daniel Buren

Daniel Buren is a renowned French conceptual artist known for his distinctive use of stripes and site-specific installations. With a practice that spans over five decades, Buren has developed characteristic visual language, often consisting of alternating white and coloured stripes, which challenges the traditional notions of art and its relationship to space.

Born in 1938 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, Buren attended the Ecole national supérieure des métiers d’Art in Paris, graduating in 1960. Between 1966 and 1967, Buren joined forces with his contemporaries Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni to form BMPT, a collective named after the initials of their last names. Their vision was to reduce paintings to the most basic physical and visual elements through the systematic repetition of motifs.

Working briefly in traditional painting styles after graduation, Buren began painting stripes since the mid-1960s. True to the BPMT ethos, Buren has since produced a substantial body of work spanning installations and paintings employing this motif consistently.

The artist first gained prominence with his series ‘affichages sauvages’, where he illegally pasted striped posters throughout Paris, treating the city as a canvas. These early works rejected the traditional art gallery setting, an approach that Buren has maintained throughout his career. His installations, which are designed specifically for the locations where they are exhibited, are a hallmark of his work.

One of Buren’s most famous installations is his Les deux plateaux, his first permanent public work at the Palais Royal in Paris. Installed between 1985 and 1986, the black-and-white striped columns, more widely known as the ‘colonnes de Buren’, set within the palace’s courtyard, sparked both public controversy and critical acclaim. The work questioned the function of public art in spaces considered historic landmarks and became a defining piece in Buren’s career.

Between 2016 and 2017, Fondation Louis Vuitton displayed Buren’s temporary work, Observatory of Light. Developed in close dialogue with the iconic building by Frank Gehry, Buren covered a striking array of coloured filters across the architecture’s 12 glass ‘sails’, showcasing the building in a new light.

Throughout his career, Buren has won numerous awards, including the Golden Lion for his French Pavilion at the 1986 Venice Biennale. He has exhibited widely, with major solo exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and more. In 2012 Buren became the fifth artist to fill the space of the Grand Palais in Paris for the Monumenta exhibition, casting a colourful canopy with his work Excentrique(s).

Daniel Buren’s work achieves exceptional prices at auction. In 2019, his 1966 painting Peinture aux forms indéfinies sold for US$2,175,000, establishing a world auction record for the artist.