This small monograph follows the set-up of Daniel Buren's artistic programs within the corporate spaces of a bank and the ways he conceived simultaneously his site-specificity and his break away from this framework.
The book is published by the commissioner, BSI (Banca della Svizzera Italiana), as part of their Art Program, relaunched in 2005 by the Italian curator and critic Luca Cerizza. Stemming from a program of site-specific commissions for the bank, the books in this series are conceived as individual monographs on each artist's contribution. Gathering preparatory material, documentation on the works, and essays by critics or the artists themselves, these volumes contribute to the discussion around commissioning, the notions of public vs. private collection, and the relationship between artists and patrons.
Other titles in the series:
John Armleder,
Robert Barry,
Liam Gillick,
Tony Cragg,
Daniel Roth.
Co-founder of the
BMTP group, Daniel Buren (born 1939 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France) is a major figure on the international art scene. He made a name for himself on the art scene in the 1960s.
In 1965, Daniel Buren settled into an approach based on a striped canvas with alternating white and coloured, 8,7 cm‑wide stripes. The introduction in late 1967 of what he called a "visual tool" laid the foundations for a practice that broke with tradition and opened up a multifaceted body of work in which freedom was born, as the artist likes to point out, out of both internal and external constraints. Daniel Buren explored this "visual tool" by developing it on a flat surface and, from the end of the 1960s, in three dimensions.
