The installation artist Daniel Buren was born in Bologne-sur-Seine in 1938. Until 1960 he studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Métiers d’Art in Paris. Together with Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni he founded the artists’ group BMPT, which set out to expand the concept of painting and has been a fixture on the art scene since its first exhibition in 1967. Soon Buren began to work increasingly in public, challenging classical institutions with his interventions which employ the alternating white and coloured stripes, always exactly 8.7 cm wide, that have become his trademark. His first important museum show, called Eine Manifestation, opened in Mönchengladbach in 1971 and travelled to thirteen other institutions. In 1972 he took part in documenta 5 in Kassel, and he has since had a major presence in international solo and group exhibitions. The Centre Pompidou devoted a comprehensive retrospective to the artist in 2002 under the title Le Musée qui n’existait pas (The Museum Which Didn’t Exist). Daniel Buren lives in Paris.
