Daniel buren biography simple

The notion of work in situ, as Daniel Buren uses it to describe his art since 1965, means that the work is site-specific; it cannot be envisaged without the setting that it was designed for and built in.

This postulate and method emerged at a time when Buren was experimenting with painting. He quickly realised that “the painting’s surroundings […] always seem richer and more important than the painting itself.” But the decisive nature of the context is often overlooked, ignored or just silently accepted because of “the work’s so-called independence” (it supposedly has an intrinsic content which behaves in the same way under all circumstances). Daniel Buren objects to this idea. He believes that the surroundings have a powerful, unspoken influence on the work: museums in particular impose their constraints and their underlying implications, which are almost always in profound contradiction with the works on display.

Through the idea of work in situ, he tries to reverse this relationship so that the art work transforms the place or at least reveals exactly what it is and what

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Daniel Buren was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France on March 25th 1938 and is a conceptual artist. After graduating from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Métiers d’Art in Paris in 1960, Buren immediately began to reject the classical teachings he had learned. He began painting in the early 1960s and came into the group B.M.P.T. standing for Buren, Mosset, Parmentier and Toroni in 1966. Together they critiqued the practices of the art establishment in Paris. Today Buren is known as the stripe guy, and this began with the B.M.P.T as he took a standard fabric with 8.7cm wide vertical stripes as his own. These stripes alternate between a color and white, and to this day can be found in the same form. The stripes are used as an instrument to expose visual aspects through a viewfinder. The site was also essential to Buren, as he made each of his works site-specific. The context around his works defined what the content could and would be. By working site-specific, Buren’s works were contingent on the site and the perspective it would giv

Born in Boulogne-Billancourt (Paris) in 1938, Daniel Buren lives and works in situ.

In the mid 60’s, Buren began to create paintings that radically questioned and explored the economy of the media used in his work and the relationship between background (support medium) and form (painting).

In 1965, when he was painting pictures that combined rounded forms and stripes varying in sizes and colours, he chose to use an industrial fabric with fixed vertical 8.7 cm-wide stripes alternating white with another colour. Beginning from this extremely simple and banal visual register, Buren further impoverished it by repeating it systematically to reach the grade of zero painting. This reflection will cause the observer’s attention to shift from the work to the physical and social environment within which the artist intervenes.

Eventually, he abandoned his studio in 1967, to favour work in situ, starting from the street, then the gallery, the museum, the landscape or the architecture.

His “visual tool” is based on the use of alternating stripes, which let him reveal the significan

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