Daniel Buren, one of the leading exponents of Conceptual Art, has a career spanning more than 50 years. Since the mid-1960s, he has been experimenting with the ‘degree zero’ of painting, starting to use an industrial fabric in his artistic practice with alternating white and coloured vertical stripes 8.7 cm wide, which leads the observer to shift his attention from the work to the entire physical and social environment in which the artist intervenes. Indeed, since 1967, Buren has abandoned studio work in favour of interventions in situ, such as streets, galleries, museums, the outdoors and buildings, creating works that are at once painting, sculpture and architecture. Playing with colours, light, different points of view and underscoring the union between art and life, the artist transforms the surrounding space and also stimulates the direct involvement of the public.
Daniel Buren (Boulogne-Billancourt, France, 1938) lives and works in situ. Earlier he trained at the École des Métiers d’Art. The many locations of his interventions include some of the major Parisian institutions such as Fondation Vuitton, Palais de Tokyo, Centre George Pompidou. He is also the author of the permanent in situ work “Les Deux Plateaux” (1985-86) located in the Court of Honor of the Palais-Royal in Paris, as well as hundreds of in situ and permanent works conceived and made for public places all around the world among which Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany, USA, Canada, Mexico, China, Korea etc... A brief selection of international interventions as one-man shows includes: Städtisches Museum, Mönchengladbach, Germany (1971); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (1976); Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands (1976); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (1976); PAC - Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy (1979); Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, Detroit, USA (1981); Brooklyn Art Museum, New York, USA (1988); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (1995); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA (2003); Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA (2005). In 1965 he won the Paris Biennale Prize, then in 1986 he represented France at the 42nd Venice Biennale where he won the prestigious Golden Lion as best pavilion. In 2007 he received the Praemium Imperiale for Painting from the Japan Art Association and in 2024 the Premio Internacional de Mecenazgo awarded by the Callia Foundation of Spain.
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Tucci Russo and Daniel Buren, Turin, 1975