For his exhibition The Eye of the Storm: Works in situ by Daniel Buren,the artist has selected three areas of the Guggenheim Museum to display his work, creating different perspectives and new experiences, even for seasoned visitors.

Around the Corner (2000/05),Daniel Buren’s work for the museum’s central rotunda, exposes the powerful presence of the building’s architecture and the various ways it engages the art on exhibition. Buren has conceived an immense cube, part of which lies within the center of the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed architecture. Although only two walls are actually built, the rest of the cube is implied to continue outside the museum’s boundaries.

Visitors entering the Guggenheim usually encounter the museum’slandmark architecture first. For this exhibition, however, visitors pass directly into Buren’s towerlike structure, walk through the shadowy interior with its exposed scaffolding, and proceed through a doorway into the light-filled museum rotunda. Buren continues to challenge expectations by focusing his work in the rotunda, which is usually left empty and experienced as a void. The mirrored surface exterior of Buren’s massive cubic structure reflects the architecture of the museum and creates a kaleidoscopic experience. The ramps are left bare, revealing the architectural skeleton. The towerlike cube reaches over the existing ramps and visitors walk in and out of the cube as they ascend. Buren’s signature stripes, in alternating vertical bands of white and bright green, adorn the parapet walls and draw visitors’ attention to the powerful character of the building itself.

Buren’s project builds on an earlier one conceived for theGuggenheim. In 1971 the artist was invited to participate in the sixth Guggenheim International Exhibition, which was designed to highlight new approaches to making art. Each artist was asked to select a portion of the museum’s unique space for displaying his or her work, which in most cases was made specifically for the show. Buren’s work was to comprise two large blue-and-white-striped banners: the smaller hung just outside the building on Eighty-eighth Street, the larger (66 x 32 ft.) suspended within the museum from below the skylight to just a few yards above the rotunda floor. When installed, this second banner bisected the void of the rotunda, obstructing views and angering several fellow exhibiting artists. It was removed, the exterior banner was never hung, and the ensuing controversy made Buren’s work legendary. Now, almost thirty-five years later, the Guggenheim has invited the artist to continue his engaging dialogue with the museum.

In addition to Around the Corner, the Guggenheim houses two other works by Buren. The High Gallery, located just off the first ramp, contains Murs de peintures (Walls of Paintings),a selection of twenty key paintings from the artist’s early career. This installation illustrates Buren’s artistic development as he abandoned traditional painting in favor of industrially made striped canvases. In the Thannhauser Galleries, Buren has selected the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed windows as the location for another in situ work, which utilizes translucent colored gels to create light and color effects within the unique geometric design. This work appears in two parts: Color, Rhythm, Transparency: The Double Frieze, work in situ, Thannhauser 3Color, Rhythm, Transparency: The Single Frieze, work in situ, Thannhauser 4.

Over the years Buren has developed a consistent and coherentartistic approach while becoming increasingly inventive and ambitious in his projects. The Eye of the Storm: Works in situ by Daniel Buren presents new manifestations of his practice while also referencing his early career and history with the Guggenheim.

–Adapted from an essay by Susan Cross, Associate Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Daniel Buren (b. 1938) iswidely considered to be one of the most important French artists working today. Through his aesthetic practice as well as his theoretical writings, he has radically questioned the nature of art and challenged conventional assumptions about the museum.

One of Buren’s earliest attempts to challenge traditional ideasabout art took place in Paris. A group of young artists including Buren collaborated in an exhibition that questioned the foundations of art, in particular its preeminent form, painting. The artists painted their canvases on site in the gallery and then dismantled them during the opening night of the exhibition, leaving behind only white walls for the duration of the show.[1]

Buren made a breakthrough in 1965 when he began working with astriped canvas originally designed for window awnings. This industrial fabric with vertical stripes (8.7 cm wide, alternating between white and a color) has since formed the basis of Buren’s artistic vocabulary. Similar to Minimalist work that utilizes prefabricated materials, repetitive motifs, and neutral forms, Buren’s work since 1965 is intentionally impersonal. He chose the stripe as his motif because it is so ordinary and devoid of illusion and subjective content.

Although Buren’s stripes have not changed, the context in which theyare shown has become increasingly complex. Due to their uniformity and neutrality, they lend themselves to endless applications and can be applied to many different surfaces. Buren has used these stripes—created with fabric, paper, tape, paint, and a variety of other materials—in and on a variety of sites, including storefronts, billboards, stairways, sailboats, trains, parks, plazas, markets, theaters, cafes, bridges, galleries, and museums, all over the world. For Buren, the striped fabric functions as an “instrument for seeing,” bringing attention to the unnoticed formal aspects—and often hidden social or political conditions—of a particular space. Simultaneously this “visual tool” expands the experiences of space, movement, and perception within familiar sites. Situated in both art and everyday environments, Buren’s works explore how changing the context of art can instill the work with meaning and raise various questions. Thus, for almost four decades, Buren has chosen to work in situ, that is, within and in response to a given location (and its particular formal, social, economic, and ideological conditions), which he sees as part of the artwork itself.

Over the years, Buren’s reputation has grown enormously as have thescale and ambition of his projects. Although his early work focused mainly on painting, his recent projects are of an architectural scale. He has built structures within existing architectural spaces using mirrors, glass, scaffolding, and concrete, as well as transparent media such as light and electricity. Following his stated goal of providing “undeniable visual pleasure,” Buren has constantly broken, stretched, and extended the boundaries of art by blurring separate artistic mediums (painting/sculpture/architecture) and deliberately producing works that exist only for a defined length of time.

Buren is internationally recognized for his environmental installations, including Les Deux Plateaux (The Two Plateaus,1985–86), a work in situ for the Cour d’Honneur at the Palais Royal in Paris. In 2002 he had a major solo exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and he is currently preparing for exhibitions in Hangzhou and Shenzhen, China, in spring 2005.