The unveiling of Daniel Buren’s new site specific work for MONUMENTA 2012. An artistic interaction on an unparalleled scale, MONUMENTA invites an internationally renowned artist each year to transform the Nave of the Grand Palais with a new, site specific work filling the 13,500 m², 35 metre-high space.
This year marks the fifth edition of the event, and it is the second consecutive year that one of Lisson Gallery’s artists has been selected to take on the ambitious project. In 2011 Anish Kapoor transformed the cavernous space with Leviathan, which attracted over 270,000 visitors in six and a half weeks.
Now Daniel Buren, one of France’s most internationally renowned and honoured artists, has risen to the challenge with Excentrique, a work in situ. Buren’s work for MONUMENTA 2012 will be on show between 10 May and 21 June, 2012. Buren and Kapoor will also be in conversation at the French Embassy in London on 17 May (details TBA).
Buren has been producing highly innovative works for the past 50 years, based on a range of outils visuels (‘visual tools’). These elements, apparently minimal, nevertheless metamorphose the spectator’s perceptions, and, despite their simplicity, have a profound effect on the viewer. Artwork and space become one, the former revealing the hidden dimensions of the latter, leading the viewer to look ‘differently’.
For MONUMENTA 2012, Buren has plunged visitors into a Grand Palais that has never been seen before. Spectators become active participants in the unveiling and creation of a brand new artwork and space. This creation is true to the rigorous approach of this renowned artist whose careful use of materials creates a maximum effect. The artist’s subtle ‘visual tools’ reveal the space’s hidden dimensions, invisible potential, past and present.
Buren’s artistic work, his theoretical approach and his physical interventions have altered the understanding of contemporary art. At the same time the artist’s fascination for the sensation of sight, of colour as a pensée brute (‘pure thought’) and the freedom and experimentation he offers to spectators, have assured his great public success.
Born in 1938 in Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris, Daniel Buren is one of France’s most celebrated artists, at home and abroad. He has realised almost two thousand exhibitions across the world. He lives and works in situ, responding above all to the space in and for which he is making the work. Examples include his transformation of the Guggenheim in New York and the Cour d’honneur at the Palais Royal in Paris. In 2012 MONUMENTA invited Daniel Buren to respond to the Nave of the Grand Palais and all its beauty, luminosity and history.
Daniel Buren Unveils MONUMENTA At Grand Palais Paris
