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Artist or Maker: Daniel Buren (b. 1938)

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Provenance: Galerie Roger Pailhas, Marseille.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1989.

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Literature: A. Boisnard and D. Buren, Daniel Buren: catalogue raisonné chronologique, 1964/1966, vol. II, Paris 2000, no. 311 (illustrated, p. 161).

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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A EUROPEAN LADY

Daniel Buren, born near Paris in 1938, has become one of the most important conceptual artists working today. Very early on in his career, in the second half of the 1960s, Buren began exclusively making striped paintings using pre-manufactured striped canvas sold at local Parisian textile markets normally used for café awnings. The striped cloth, which Buren called a 'seeing tool' is made with either blue, green, red or orange stripes, but is otherwise exactly the same, including the width between stripes, which is invariably 8.7cm. In 1966, Buren began a series of these stripe paintings in which each work was given a coat of white paint exclusively around the edges of the 'canvas.'

After working on these paintings in his studio for some time, Buren then turned to larger, more public, site specific projects, where he thought his work would have a more powerful impact. In 1968, without permission, Buren posted 200 of his striped posters all around Paris, and in 1970 hung the posters in 140 métro stations around the city. The invasiveness and audacity of the works drew a considerable amount of attention and have become blueprints upon which artistic practice has been modelled for younger generations. Buren has continued to give various public and institutional exibitions around Europe, Japan and America, culminating with his more recent retrospective at the Centre George Pompidou, Paris in 2002.

Buren speaks of the stripes, which have been his motif for nearly forty years, as 'visual tools rich in constructive and structural references' and 'neutral signs with which any space can be measured.' Furthermore, his striped paintings are reflective of the Duchampian notion of the readymade or found object, and illustrate the artist's response to the ethos of modernist painting as it stood in the late 1950s.

The present work, Peinture aux formes variables (1966), is one of Buren's earliest stripe paintings.

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