Studio International reviews ‘Daniel Buren: Pages in situ’
18 August 2026
“How do you curate an exhibition surveying the significance of the French conceptual artist Daniel Buren’s output down the decades? It would seem an almost impossible task. His work depends on the time and place of its installation, his best pieces were made for places outside the gallery or museum, and the fundamental motif of all his work hasn’t changed in 60 years. The mundane minimality of the 8.7cm (3.4in) stripes Buren (b1938, Paris) has been inserting into various architectural spaces since 1965 acts as a “visual tool” – as he puts it – to get us to stop and think about the world around us (without telling us what to think), with the potential to subvert the ideological givenness of appearances. The works have always been, therefore, in situ, made for the space they (often temporarily) inhabit. Hence his massive takeover of the Pompidou Centre in 2002 – which for most artists receiving such an honour at the age of 64 would have been a retrospective – constituted a “new” artwork in itself. The weird and wonderful, stripy labyrinth deflected attention not only to the museum’s postmodernist architecture but also, as Rosalind Krauss observed in her review in Artforum, to the works it housed.
Buren, therefore, in many ways resists the museumification that would decommission his work’s site-specificity and public role, and the consumerist exchange dependent on an artwork’s easy mobility, in order to stick as truly as possible to an ethos of egalitarianism. His Diamonds and Circles, installed at London’s Tottenham Court Road station in 2016, is unavoidably tangled up with the power dynamics of public infrastructure. Yet, while its stripes and primary colours are suggestive of the tube map, it distils its aesthetic qualities without mapping us, thus stimulating a subjective response. A healthy share of its fluid, contingent meaning is in the hands of passersby. At a time when didacticism governs so much political art, Buren’s democratic, open-ended approach is refreshing.”
As the article continues…
“The effect is to emphasise Buren’s relationship to time – and how this, in turn, relates to space. We might feel, for instance, Buren’s importance in the history of Lisson Gallery, which staged its first solo show of his work in 1976. And yet, because his work changes primarily because its context does (Buren had three shows at Lisson before Tony Fretton’s current building opened in 1991), and because the works will soon be moved from this context (notwithstanding the dispersion of other copies), the spatiotemporal relation posed by Muggeridge’s placement is unstable and open-ended. This is theorised in a red-striped, folded poster, ephemera included in the catalogue for the Guggenheim International Exhibition of 1971. Along the bottom of one fold is written: “Detail in Actual Size of a Work Executed in 1970”. Along the other: “Detail in Actual Size of a Work Executed in 1971”. Time changes, the work does not, its constancy highlighting that which changes around it and the artist’s fraught relationship with editorial and curatorial time.”
Read the full article, written by Tom Denman for Studio International, here.
Image: Installation view of ‘Daniel Buren: Pages in Situ’, 11 June – 5 September 2026 © Daniel Buren. Courtesy Lisson Gallery.
