Daniel Buren
12 July 2022—29 January 2023
Daegu museum, Daegu, South Korea
The Daegu Art Museum will hold a solo exhibition of Daniel Buren, one of France’s leading contemporary artists, as an International Exchange Exhibition of 2022. Organized for the first time by a public art museum in Korea, Buren’s film Out of Time, Out of Sight and his large-scale installation piece Like Child’s Play will make an appearance for the first time in Asia.
This exhibition of Buren, which focuses on the specific relationship between work and space, welcomes visitors to three main spaces. First, in UMI Hall, where visitors will encounter, a white room located in the wide and long hall that has been seen before; Inside, the large-scale installation Like Child’s Play, which has been displayed only three times in France, Italy, and Australia, will be installed. Audiences will face geometric modules in the form of tetrahedrons, cubes, cylinders, pyramids, or arch-shaped that are up to six meters high, and walk through the symmetric arrangement which resembles a giant architectural game.
After that, when audiences enter the Gallery 1, they will encounter a 6.5-hour documentary film, Out of Time, Out of Sight, directed and produced by the artist himself. The film, displayed on the vast wall, invites the audience into the artist’s past. The video begins with the story of Harald Szeemann’s legendary exhibition in 1968, and it is like Buren’s autobiography. The audience can immediately discover through the film, how challenging, avant-garde and courageous Buren is.
Lastly, after passing through the dark room with interesting film works, the audience can see the number of installations with intense yet pure chroma. The space, where Buren’s trademark stripe patterns are hidden everywhere, is mostly installed with recent works from 2015. Buren has started using mirrors in his works in the 1990s, and the mirrors often appear in the displayed installations in this exhibition. For Buren, a mirror is a special tool used to transform a space by fragmenting, or transforming it. When standing in front of the artwork, the audience unintentionally engages in the relationship between the spectator and space through the mirror. As a result, the audience becomes an important reference point that separates the existentiality and illusion of Buren’s work.
Daniel Buren has built his own world of work, criticizing the modernist art system or rejecting the frame of art trends that provoke fixed perspectives. In other words, he is an artist who pursues creativity, experiments, and critical logic. At present where people live complex lives with innumerable information and knowledge, Daegu Art Museum invites the audience to take the time to purely contemplate the essence of art through the determined and refined works of Daniel Buren.
