(Boulogne-Billancourt, 1938)

An education at the School of artistic professions consents him to apprehend the fundamental techniques of painting and of decorating. The first job as a professional, a series of paintings on wood for a hotel in the Caribbean, constitutes a “passage à l’acte”, through which he frees himself from all the influences that could have weighted on his artistic practice.

He chooses from 1965 to use non conventional pictorial means, the by now famous industrial textures with stripes that serve as a background to his paintings. This choice responds to the need for objectiveness and impersonality that he searches for.

At the end of 1966, Buren constitutes with other painters, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier and  Niele Toroni, the BMPT group, that upsets the practices of artistic creation through a series of manifestations, based on systematic repetition of a same motif, that pose themselves radically against the Parisian artistic tendencies of the moment, very academic and strictly linked to the École de Paris (School of Paris). The group splits up a year later but Daniel Buren brings on this reflection, working not so much on painting but more on space and its context, as an “enlargement of the visual field”. In November 1967 Buren affixes directly on the walls of Paris big sheets of paper with vertical stripes measuring 8.7 cm. This invariable “outil visuel” (visual instrument), assumes a shape and makes sense only if it is confronted with its context, therefore “in situ”. The act of painting is therefore eliminated and so is the object (the painting). Precision, strictness and radicality are pushed to the extreme.

I understood that, if this sign is totally neutral and impersonal, then the job itself can become, on the contrary, extremely personal. What counts is the collocation of the sign, its position, and this can’t be nothing else but personal.” Daniel Buren realized in the world hundreds of interventions ”in situ”, in each of which a detail of the place is underlined. The interventions are mostly ephemeral works, accompanied by descriptive texts or by explicatory notes.