Daniel Buren to unveil installation at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

9 May 2016

A site-specific work by Daniel Buren, titled Observatory of Light, has been unveiled at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. The work comprises a staggering array of 13 coloured filters installed in equal distances across the foundation's 3,600 glass ‘sails’, an emblematic feature of the Frank Gehry-designed building.

Through a play of sunlight, reflections, transparencies and contrasts, various coloured forms appear and disappear at different intervals throughout the day. True to Buren’s signature style, his visual tool of alternating white and coloured vertical stripes also appear perpendicular to the ground.

Throughout his career Daniel 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”, which played simultaneously on an economy of means and the relationship between the support and the medium. In 1965 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.

Please click here for more information on the installation.

Image: Daniel Buren, L’Observatoire de la lumière, travail in situ, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2016. Detail. © DB-ADAGP Paris / Fondation Louis Vuitton. Photo: Iwan Baan.