Œuvres contemporaines, 1964-1966

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Kamel Mennour Gallery, Paris, from April to July 2010. 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. The Swiss-born sculptor/painter Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) is best known for his bronzes depicting ghostly and attenuated figures, which made him a key member of the Surrealist movement. Between 1936 and 1940, Giacometti concentrated on the human head, focusing on the model’s gaze, followed by a unique artistic phase in which his statues became stretched out, as he attempted to translate the phenomenological experience of looking at someone. His paintings underwent a parallel procedure: the figures appear isolated, emaciated, and are the result of continuous reworking. Giacometti reached worldwide fame at the end of the 1950s and has been the subject to major retrospectives around the world.