Daniel Buren

12.07.2022 - 29.01.2023

Daniel Buren
International Exchange Exhibition Daniel Buren

The Daegu Art Museum will hold a solo exhibition of Daniel Buren, one of France’s leading contemporary artists, as an International Exchange Exhibition of 2022. Organized for the first time by a public art museum in Korea, Buren’s film Out of Time, Out of Sight and his large-scale installation piece Like Child’s Play will make an appearance for the first time in Asia.

Born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, Buren has been constantly evolving and transforming through his vigorous work, creating both admiration and controversy in the international art scene. After finding himself in the center of attention in 1986 when Buren presented a public artwork the Two Levels (Les Deux Plateaux) at the courtyard of Palais-Royal in Paris, he made his name renowned in the international art scene when he won the Golden Lion from the 42nd Venice Biennale. Since then, he has continuously introduced his works around the world and was given the Living Treasure Award in New Zealand(1990), the International Award for Best Artist in Stuttgart(1991), and the Praemium Imperiale Art Award in Japan(2007).

Since the early 1960s, Buren dealt with the relationship between the content and form of the work freely and he methodologically constructed simplicity by combining circles and stripes from the early stage of his artistic career. From 1965, he attempted to vertically cross-arrange industrial fabrics consisting of white and chromatic colors with a width of 8.7cm. While doing so, he expanded his thoughts on various possibilities of the materials, the way in which painting and expression were performed, and the social and physical environment in which the artist intervenes. In the streets of 1967, Buren began to ask questions about the ‘space’ that accommodates his works. He later devised the concept of ‘in-situ’ while shifting his gaze to galleries, art museums, and buildings; it has been established as a representative motif explaining his art world until today. The vertical stripes, so-called ‘visual tools’ by Buren, show the structure of his ‘in-situ’ work. This is because the vertical stripes placed between paintings, sculptures, and architecture, or inside of particular devices that are special or complex, calmly ‘expose’ the important features of the space in which Buren works.

This exhibition of Buren, which focuses on the specific relationship between work and space, welcomes visitors to three main spaces. First, in UMI Hall, where visitors will encounter, a white room located in the wide and long hall that has been seen before; Inside, the large-scale installation Like Child’s Play, which has been displayed only four times in France, Italy, Australia and Mexico, will be installed. Audiences will face geometric modules in the form of tetrahedrons, cubes, cylinders, pyramids, or arch-shaped that are up to six meters high, and walk through the symmetric arrangement which resembles a giant architectural game.

After that, when audiences enter the Gallery 1, they will encounter a 6.5-hour documentary film, Out of Time, Out of Sight, directed and produced by the artist himself. The film, displayed on the vast wall, invites the audience into the artist’s past. The video begins with the story of Harald Szeemann’s legendary exhibition in 1968, and it is like Buren’s autobiography. The audience can immediately discover through the film, how challenging, avant-garde and courageous Buren is.

Lastly, after passing through the dark room with interesting film works, the audience can see the number of installations with intense yet pure chroma. The space, where Buren’s trademark stripe patterns are hidden everywhere, is mostly installed with recent works from 2015. Buren has started using mirrors in his works in the 1990s, and the mirrors often appear in the displayed installations in this exhibition. For Buren, a mirror is a special tool used to transform a space by fragmenting, or transforming it. When standing in front of the artwork, the audience unintentionally engages in the relationship between the spectator and space through the mirror. As a result, the audience becomes an important reference point that separates the existentiality and illusion of Buren’s work.

Daniel Buren has built his own world of work, criticizing the modernist art system or rejecting the frame of art trends that provoke fixed perspectives. In other words, he is an artist who pursues creativity, experiments, and critical logic. At present where people live complex lives with innumerable information and knowledge, Daegu Art Museum invites the audience to take the time to purely contemplate the essence of art through the determined and refined works of Daniel Buren.

The catalog for this exhibition will be published around September 20 and available for purchase at Daegu Art Museum’s Art Information Center.