Lisson Gallery, London will be the subject of an intervention this November by Daniel Buren, France’s most influential living artist. For over forty years Buren has examined the role of the gallery as a supposedly neutral space. He creates “works in situ” which “open a space for distraction” by working within the context of existing architectural, spatial and social elements. The show at Lisson will be his first solo exhibition in the UK since 2009.
Widely respected for spearheading an epoch in the presentation of art works, Buren’s work predates the profusion of site responsive art commissions which have today become an accepted norm not just in the art world but in urban design and the public realm. In 1969 Buren illegally plastered the streets of Bern, Switzerland with striped posters as a public intervention in response to an exhibition, When Attitudes Become Form, to which he wasn’t invited. He was arrested for installing art works on public property, which decades later would be in the highest demand from public commissioning bodies from Paris to Tokyo and New York, making Daniel Buren one of the world’s most revered living artists and a driving influence on contemporary art.
It was Buren’s critical analysis of painting, attempting to refine the act to an elemental form that led him to find what is now a trademark “visual tool”, the use of 8.7cm wide white and coloured vertical stripes. He employs this tool across canvas, posters, Plexiglas, aluminium and architectural elements, experimenting with light, colour and reflection. Buren explains “The visual tool is no longer a work to be seen, or to be beheld, but is the element that permits you to see or behold something else.”. Buren’s major public interventions can now be seen worldwide at locations including The Palais-Royal in Paris; Odaïba Bay, Tokyo and the Ministry of Labour, Berlin. Few artists are invited as regularly to take part in major international exhibitions as Daniel Buren. He was invited three times to Documenta in Kassel and six to the Venice Biennale. Recent exhibitions include works in situ at The Turner Contemporary, Margate and a joint initiative between Mudam, Luxembourg and Centre Pompidou Metz, France.
An epic installation at The Guggenheim, New York in 1971, where Buren dressed the central rotunda with a 20m high striped cloth, was so commanding it was removed, to great outrage, after fellow artists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin claimed it compromised their works in the same exhibition. Buren was invited back in 2005, creating a reflective tower that reached the roof of the rotunda, accentuating the powerful architectural features of Frank Lloyd-Wright’s iconic building.
Often controversial and always subversive, at the age of seventy three Daniel Buren will appropriate the space at Lisson Gallery in way that can not and will not happen in any other space and at any other time.
Lisson Gallery: 29 Bell Street, London, NW1 5DA
Opening Hours: Monday-Friday 10am-6pm, Saturday 11am-5pm
Tel: + 44(0)20 7724 2739
For press information and images please contact:
Sophie da Gama Campos or Toby Kidd at JBPelhamPR
Tel: +44 20 8969 3959
