BRUSSELS.- The internationally renowned French artist is known for his in situ works, characterised by the presence of a recurring motif made up of alternating white and coloured stripes. The specific character and often short-lived nature of Daniel Buren’s works (80% of his works no long exist!) mean a classic retrospective of his work would have been impossible.

With this exhibition entitled “A Fresco”, Daniel Buren offers an original solution to this dilemma. The exhibition has been conceived as a visual and temporal crossing in the course of which Daniel Buren establishes a dialogue between his work and selected works by more than 100 artists from the 20th and 21st century. These artists who had a major influence on his own artistic career, from Paul Cézanne, Fernand Léger, Claude Monet to Pablo Picasso, by way of Jackson Pollock and Sol LeWitt to Pierre Huyghe and plenty more besides.

A specific work, in the form of a film directed by the artist, provides a major overview of his works from the 1960s until the present day, and more particularly of his ephemeral creations. This multiscreen fresco made up of be a combination of archive images, film extracts, commentaries and interviews.

Daniel Buren created a work in the Horta Hall, on the fringes of the exhibition circuit. This work is in relation to the architecture of the Centre for Fine Arts.

A Fresco has been entirely conceived and carried out by Daniel Buren in collaboration with Joël Benzakin. It is being specifically created for the spaces in the Centre for Fine Arts. This exhibition promises to be an unmissable milestone in Buren’s work.

This exhibition is primarily built up from the artist’s perspective, of his particular answers to the feasibility – taking into account the demands of his work - of “representing” a crossing, a journey which reveals the relationship he has with his era and the different artistic or cultural trends which affected or influenced its practice. Working in situ, Daniel Buren continues to assert his specificity through the numerous interventions, most of which are short-lived, which make up the majority of his works. How then is it possible to give an account of the wealth of his creations and their relationships with the contexts in which they were created, whether transient or permanent? This simple question was an immediate reminder of the problems raised by the idea of a retrospective and of its impossibility, as demonstrated by his 2002 exhibition “Le Musée qui n‘existait pas" (The Museum that didn’t exist) in the Georges Pompidou Centre.

A Fresco seeks to answer these questions in an active, non-chronological and, as so often is the case, surprising manner. Built up around a dialogue between the artist and Joel Benzakin, the exhibition is based on two major assertions: a ‘collective exhitibion’ and a film.

This Daniel Buren exhibition thus constitutes an essential step for a broader understanding of his work, the aesthetic issues that he asserts and the unexpected wealth of his numerous permanent and transient creations, a reminder of which, up until now, was only accessible to us through the numerous publications on offer.

This huge ‘fresco’ of works by Daniel Buren finally enables us to better understand the diversity, intelligence, generosity and importance of his work.

Daniel Buren (°1938, BoulogneBillancourt) is one of the best known and most influential contemporary artists of his generation. Since the end of the 1960s, he has enjoyed international renown thanks to the in situ works he has created all over the world. His interventions are always linked to a specific place or situation, be it artistic institutions, private places or the public space. The majority of his creations are ephemeral but Daniel Buren also has some permanent works to his name which are part of the most prestigious public and private collections. One of the most famous is Les Deux Plateaux (1986), a gigantic 3000 m² installation in the main courtyard of the Palais-Royal in Paris. He has also taken over, amongst others, the Guggenheim in New York in 2005, the Georges Pompidou Centre, and, more recently, the nave of the Grand Palais for the 2012 edition of Monumenta.

There have been more than 2600 Daniel Buren exhibitions throughout the world. He has participated in the Kassel Documenta and the Venice Biennale (where he won the Golden Lion in 1986) on several occasions. In 2007, he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, by the Emperor of Japan. This award is widely considered to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for visual arts.

Since 1967, Daniel Buren has been using a recurrent motif inspired by the awnings of Parisian shops and bistros: alternating vertical white and colourful stripes, each of a width of 8.7 cm. The artist was looking for a sign, a visual tool, capable of creating an impression both inside and outside the museum. The street or any kind of exhibition space have thus become his favoured workplaces, the alternating stripes don’t have any significance other than their relationship with the site in which they have been placed. Indeed it would be a mistake to only consider them in their own right. They are a means of revealing a place and bringing about the necessary shift of gaze as desired by the artist.