Daniel Buren

Daniel Buren (Boulogne-Billancourt, 1938) is a French conceptual artist whose work is recognised for its large, regular stripes. It matters because it challenged the idea of the self-sufficient artwork and proposed that each piece should engage with the place where it is shown, whether a gallery, a museum, a historic building or the street.

In the late 1960s Buren adopted the stripe as his central motif. He used striped awning fabric, very common in France, and the standard stripe, 8.7 cm wide, became his visual tool, which he described as a "tool for seeing". He began with unauthorised interventions: he placed hundreds of striped posters around Paris and later in more than a hundred metro stations. At his first solo exhibition he blocked the gallery entrance with stripes. His work sits between abstract minimalism and site-specific practice, in which the viewer's movement becomes part of the piece.

In the 1970s and 1980s he exhibited in Europe, the United States and Japan. From Japan he took the notion of sha-kei, which refers to borrowing a landscape ephemerally, in contrast with the Western idea of framing and possessing. In 1986 he created the sculpture Les Deux Plateaux in the courtyard of the Palais Royal in Paris, known as the Buren Columns, which sparked intense debate about contemporary art sitting alongside historic buildings. It is the only work in his output to have been given the title of Historic Monument, although over time it has suffered infiltration and lighting problems due to lack of maintenance. That same year he represented France at the Venice Biennale and won the Golden Lion.

More recent work includes interventions at the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara in 2014, where he painted the church, previously painted by José Clemente Orozco, whom he considers one of his masterpieces. In 2007 he received the Praemium Imperiale. His legacy is visible in the way contemporary art engages with architectural and urban context.