Daniel Buren was born in France in the year 1938. Buren is best described as a minimalist artist and he specializes in sculpture and working with fiber optic materials. Buren’s signature style is to take a long vertical rectangular shape and place it with white and one color to enhance the shape of the architecture. The artist had done many public works and this suits his style well. This works are also unique in that each is a site specific installation and Buren will use his stripes to highlight his favorite parts of the structure.
Price range information: The artist has used many mediums and you may find serigraphs ranging from $1000 to $4,000 with lithographs reaching as high as five figures. His most expensive works are acrylics which can reach as high as $500,000. Works in crayon range from $3000 to $5,000. Works in acrylics range from $10,000 to $180,000.
In this clip we see more of the artist’s works set to music by Rip Van Winkle.
For his collegiate studies Buren attended the Ecole National Superior des Metiers d’Art in Paris. He would go on to spend one year living in the Caribbean working for a hotel in St. Croix. Whilst living there he received some commissions to paint frescoes. Also while living here he abandoned traditional painting for good and started to use the vertical stripes for which he has become famous.
Doing some more research on this artist, I have also determined him to be among the first street artists. Lets take a look at another modern street artist/vandal depending on your point of view, another street artist hailing from France, the Invader. My simple definition of a street artist is one who puts his art on public spaces without asking for a commission or fee. The artist donates his or her time in order to improve the community. The Invader took part in a very ambitious idea for his street art placing his Invader characters on many places around the globe from Hollywood to shirt of the French president Jacques Chirac.
The Invader also makes incredible works of art out of Rubik’s cube, then photographs them and sells the photographs. Here is an example of one of these works and you may recognize the celebrity, Jack Nicholson from the Shining.
And here is an example of his street art using the characters from a now vintage arcade game titled Space Invaders. This is the character he used to place on public places that made him famous and gave him his nickname of the the Invader artist.
In this quick clip the street artist the Invader is featured.
I chose to relate a modern day street artist that was born in 1969, to Daniel Buren who started pasting his vertical stripes all over public places in France in 1970. Buren placed his stripes on more than one hundred metro stations throughout Paris. This is the main mode of transportation akin to the New York subway so many people became familiar with his artwork after this. Buren also placed his stripes in Los Angeles, again without permission.
Buren also gained fame for his many photographs, which he calls photo souvenirs of his many ventures around the world. These number more than 400,000 and it gives the viewer a chance to see his many public works. Or you may watch the youtube clip!
Buren formed a group that worked on reducing painting to its most basic forms and shapes, the group went by BMPT.
Buren has also worked for companies such as Hermes, a leading lifestyle manufacturer of items such as leather and other luxury items, helping to design stores and special events.
The artist still lives and works out of France.
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