Belgians are, knowingly or not, familiar with the work of Daniel Buren. Between the blue flags with white stripes adorning the Place de la Justice in Brussels, and the newly inaugurated installation at the station of Liège-Guillemins, the work of Daniel Buren is becoming a landmark in the Belgian landscape.

On the occasion of the publication of CRISS-CROSS, TheMerode welcomes Daniel Buren for a day celebrating the oeuvre of one of the most iconic artists of the contemporary art scene.

A total of 39 people have contributed to CRISS-CROSS, Roulette Russe’s monograph on Daniel Buren. The contributors have in common that their paths have crossed those of Daniel Buren at a formative time – for themselves as well as for Daniel Buren. CRISS-CROSS tells the story of Daniel Buren through the voices of people he has collaborated with during the last 50 years; writers, curators, gallerists, collectors, colleagues, art critics who all had an impact on sculpting his life and art. The written contributions are accompanied by a generous amount of captivating visual material referring to the projects Buren did through the selected collaborations.

In parallel with the launch of Daniel Buren’s monograph, his movie “A contretemps, à perte de vue” will be shown in TheMerode cinema room.

This composition offers an overview of his work from the end of the sixties until today.

From A like AFFICHAGES to Z like ZIEUTER, the film is composed of fifty-two chapters classified in alphabetical order. Each chapter arranges the works presented and commented on chronologically. The approach is tenably “retrospective” presenting the astonishing breadth of Daniel Buren’s works. The current version lasts 6 hours and 25 minutes and may be modified in order to add new chapters, other encounters and interventions that will be integrated in the form of a video montage evolving in perpetuity. Beyond the amount of information that this undertaking represents, one of the main assets of this film lies in the possibility of updating its content, the ability to keep it alive and to associate the four fundamental elements to its reception: image, time, sound and movement.

About:

Daniel Buren is a world-renowned French artist whose work lies at the crossroads of sculpture, installation and painting, as well as action and intervention. He came to fame in Paris with the B.M.P.T. group (the initials of Buren, Mosset, Parmentier and Toroni) in 1966-67 and continued to develop a critique of the art establishment. Buren appropriated a standard format fabric motif of 8.75 cm-wide vertical stripes (which alternate between white and a colour) as a visual instrument, or sign, to ‘expose’. He works on site, or in situ, in relation to the setting, a specific building or public site, its history and the particular circumstances surrounding the work’s production. Two examples that caused heated debate were Peinture-Sculpture at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1971) and the public commission Les Deux Plateaux (1986) at the Palais Royal in Paris. Throughout his career, he has documented all these events and grouped the images under the title Photo-souvenirs. Since the 1990s, his work has become increasingly architectural using fencing or grids, and stained-glass window structures, such as his installation for Monumenta at the Grand Palais in Paris (2012).

Daniel Buren (b. 1938, Boulogne-Billancourt, France) lives and works in situ. He represented France at the Venice Biennale in 1986. Several volumes of his catalogue raisonné have already been published.

Program:

• 11:30 – 17:30 > Introduction and screening of “A contretemps, à perte de vue” (6h 25min)
• 15:00 – 15:30 > Book presentation by Helene Gamst, publisher of CRISS-CROSS*
• 15:30 – 17:00 > Book signing by Daniel Buren
• 19:00 > End

*CRISS-CROSS is distributed through Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter und Franz König and Roulette Russe, 448 pages, French, English.