4 Colours at 3 metres high situated work

Daniel Buren has punctuated the past 50 years of art with unforgettable interventions, controversial critical texts, thought-provoking public art projects and engaging collaborations with artists from different generations. Throughout his career Buren has created artworks that complicate the relationship between art and the structures that frame it. In the early 1960s, he developed a radical form of Conceptual Art, a “degree zero of painting” as he called it, which played simultaneously on an economy of means and the relationship between the support and the medium. In1965 he began using his 8.7cm-wide vertical stripes as the starting point for research into what painting is, how it is presented and, more broadly, the physical and social environment in which an artist works. All of Buren’s interventions are created ‘in situ’, appropriating and colouring the spaces in which they are presented. They are critical tools addressing questions of how we look and perceive, and the way space can be used, appropriated, and revealed in its social and physical nature. In his work life finds its way into art, while autonomous art is able to reconnect with life. Daniel Buren was born in Boulogne-Billancourt in 1938. Lives and works in situ. He has been the subject of retrospectives at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York (2005) and the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2002). His work is also included in prestigious private and public collections orldwide. Buren has exhibited in the Venice Biennale more than 10 times and was awarded the Golden Lion for his French Pavilion in 1986. That same year, he produced his first and most ontroversial public commission, The Two Plateaux, for the main courtyard of the Palais-Royal in Paris. In 2007, he received the Praemium Imperiale for Painting from Japan. Most recently, he was selected to exhibit at Monumenta 2012 at the Grand Palais in Paris while other recent exhibitions include Défini, Fini, Infini, travaux in situ, MaMo — Marseille Modulor, Centre d'art de la Cité, Marseille, France and Catch as catch can: works in situ, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK.