MEXICO CITY.- Galería Hilario Galguera is presenting Daniel Buren’s solo show, “Las cajas, trabajos situados, 2022” (“The Boxes, situated works, 2022”.)
This exhibition forms part of Buren’s most recent body of work based on cubes, in which the interior walls of the gallery have been covered by colourful modular sculptures. The hybrid situated works along with the circulation and movement throughout the exhibition, modify the experience and understanding of architectural space.
Daniel Buren is an artist who has based his practice, among other things, on the idea of the zero degree of painting, which consists of the negation of painting (on canvas) as an object and its reduction to minimal components, color and support. This concept is formally emphasized by the use and repetition of basic geometric forms and the combination of primary colors. In this sense, his proposal also revolves around the inseparability between audience, site and art, or, subject-object-experience. Even when his works are not directly painted onto walls, Buren often makes use of translucent materials as a strategy to visually integrate the environment with the artwork, or vice versa.
The exhibition is composed of 25 situated works produced in Mexico and designed specifically for the gallery.
Daniel Buren (Paris,1938) lives and works in situ. His work is located within the field of conceptual discourse and institutional critic, focussing on the intervention between public space and architecture. Buren was granted, among many other distinctions and awards, the Golden Lion by the Venice Biennale in 1986 and the Premium Imperial in Japan in 2007. In 1985 he created his most controversial public installation, Les deux plateaux, within the patio of the Palais Royal in Paris. In his career he has exhibited in the most important museums and institutions around the world including the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2005 and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2002. In 2012 his show Excentriques was presented as part of the Monumenta cycle at the Grand Palais in Paris. L’Observatoire de la lumiére, an intervention to Foundation Louis Vuitton’s building, was presented from 2016 - 2017. Daniel Buren has completed more than 3000 public interventions worldwide, as well as many permanent works.
In 2014, Daniel Buren carried out, at the initiative of Hilario Galguera, one of the most significant interventions of his career at the Hospicio Cabañas in the city of Guadalajara, Jalisco. The neoclassical architectural configuration of the space, designed by Manuel Tolsá, constituted an aesthetic echo of the designs of André Le Nôtre, a French architect whose works have influenced Buren’s work. This, along with the presence of the most important murals of the Mexican muralist movement of José Clemente Orozco in the main chapel of the hospice, represented a conceptual reunion of the factors that influenced the practice of a great master, resulting in his intervention of 19 patios of the building and the creation of a monumental mural in the Tolsá chapel of the same space, today unfortunately disappeared. It was here that one of the most significant and emotional cycles of the course of Buren’s life as a creator concluded.
Two years later, in 2016, he returned to Mexico, invited by the Governor of the state of Aguascalientes, Carlos Lozano de la Torre and Hilario Galguera, with another monumental work entitled “Como un juego de niños” ( ̈Like a Child’s Game”) at the Espacio Museum, which later traveled to other parts of the world.
