Image: Daniel Buren, Photo-Souvier: Voile Toile Toile Voile, 2011, Istanbul, Maçka Sanat Galerisi (first staged in Berlin, 1975).

It is a true honour to bring the uncompromising and influential French conceptual artist, Daniel Buren to Winnipeg. Presented by Plug In ICA, and hosted at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in their auditorium on Tuesday, April 9, 2019, the legendary Buren will give a public talk detailing his bold and categorical work.

Buren is known in the art-world for his signature stripes, which he began using in the late 1960s as part of a counter-culture in the visual arts that rejected the authenticity of the artist -- questioning the art market, its valorization of individual genius and the progression of ideas into a resolution. As a critical action, Buren limited his palette and form to vertical stripes of 8.7 cm in width alternating from one colour to white, which he applied to the surfaces of buildings, fences, windows, stairwells and canvases. Even though Buren’s work has expanded to include a variety of sculptural and colourfield approaches, he continues to apply this basic aesthetic formula of monochrome vertical stripes to architectural surfaces and environmental forms, giving equal significance to his intervention and the surface it occupies. 

What: Artist Talk by Daniel Buren
When: Tuesday, April 9th, 2019 | 7pm
Where: at Winnipeg Art Gallery (300 Memorial Blvd, Winnipeg, Canada)

Plug In ICA presents this talk as part of our STAGES Speaker Series in anticipation of the STAGES biennial in 2019. For STAGES 2019, Buren will remount a work for the first time since 1981 titled, Limited Time Only!. This site-specific intervention was initially produced in Toronto in a St. James Town apartment block for which Buren offered to wallpaper apartments within the building with his signature stripes. Residents of the apartment block could have an artwork by Buren for the minimal cost of the wallpaper itself: $50 for one wall, $125 for an entire room. Plug In ICA will work with Buren to restage this work in Winnipeg in August 2019, selecting an apartment block similar in history and economic status to the original, offering its residents an opportunity to have a work by Buren installed in their homes for a Limited Time Only!. The title emulates language used in advertising, but references the tenuous and precarious nature of the renter.  

*With its conception in 2017, STAGES sets out to activate the city of Winnipeg with temporary public sculpture, installation and performances by international and local artists. STAGES biennial is set to launch on August 16, 2019. Please Save-the-date. The Speaker Series is a means of initiating and connecting the artists with local audiences, and introducing visiting artists to Winnipeg.

Daniel Buren, born in Boulogne-Billancourt, is a world-renown artist variously associated with conceptualism during his extensive career. In the past fifty years, Buren has produced unforgettable artworks; controversial and incisive critical writing; and numerous collaborations with an impressive range of visual artists. Through his critical and artistic work, Buren has made an extended investigation into the relation between art and the social structures through which it is understood. In the early 1960s, he developed a radical form of conceptual art, a “degree zero of painting,” deploying a now characteristic series of vertical stripes to interrogate what painting is and how it affects and is affected by the physical, psychological and sociopolitical environment. Much of Buren’s artworks are created in situ as site-specific interventions that borrow and colour the spaces they are presented within. Most recently, Buren has had major exhibitions at the Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis, USA), Kunstammlungen Chemnitz (Chemnitz, Germany), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf, Germany), Centre Pompidou Málaga (Málaga, Spain), BOZAR Palais des Beaux-Artes (Brussels, Belgium), Museo-Espacio (Aguascalientes, Mexico) and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead, UK). His two volumes of collected critical writings are published by Éditions Flammarion.

Our presenting sponsor for this talk is Mike Nesbitt with the support of The Winnipeg Foundation and The Consult General of France in Toronto.

The Winnipeg Art Gallery joins us as a community partner who will support the event by hosting Buren’s talk in their auditorium.