DANIEL BUREN 'VARIABLE/INVARIABLE' at BORTOLAMI DAYAN

Thursday, 25 January 2007 08:34

New York City - Bortolami Dayan is proud to present two concurrent exhibitions by Daniel Buren.  At 510 West 25^th Street, Buren will exhibit paintings from 1965-66. At 508 West 25^th Street, in the outdoor space adjacent to the gallery, the artist will create a unique Plexiglas installation.  On exhibition until 15 February, 2007.

The paintings exhibited here in the gallery represent the first works in which Buren started using a pre-printed fabric to express his vision.  Up until this point, the artist had been painting colored shapes, specifically stripes, on various fabrics and colored bed sheets.  In September of 1965, while in a Parisian market, Buren found different kinds of commonly used pre-printed striped fabrics, including one with alternating white and colored stripes.  Buren realized this was the perfect medium in which to create his work, reducing his paintings to their simplest visual and physical elements and ridding them of allusion or subjectivity.  Each stripe has a standard width of 8.7cm and was limited to the colors green, yellow, blue, red, orange, brown, and black interspersed with equidistant white bands.  Given these standardized limitations, Buren varied the size and proportion of the canvases. He would then apply white painted lines or scalloped patterning at the edges of these canvases to differentiate his work from a readymade.  The artist was able to break down the paintings to the very basic components of the work – a partly painted surface, a support and its surroundings.

From the late 1960s on, Buren began thinking of his work in terms of its location in regards to both interior and exterior, private and public environments.  Although the bold patterns of colored stripes command attention in interior spaces, because of their ordinary associations (beach umbrellas, awnings, and wallpaper) they are often not recognized as art when installed outdoors in the public realm.  This aspect of Daniel Buren's work is, in effect, one of his intentions; to create an art that defies a traditional definition of art as an object for aesthetic contemplation.  In December 1967, for the first time, the artist pasted pre-printed posters with vertical bands on outdoor wall advertisements, phone booths and throughout the Parisian urban landscape thus opening up Buren’s work to a much larger, very public audience - challenging the conventional notions of where art can be seen and how it can be understood.  It was at this time that Buren introduced the term “work in situ” to the art world.