Daniel Buren
"Third Eye, situated works"

With a career spanning more than sixty years since the mid-1960s, Daniel Buren (born in 1938 in Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris. He lives and works in situ) is today regarded as one of the most important conceptual artists of our time. From the founding association of Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni in 1966, which made waves within the traditional art establishment of the time, to the “affichages sauvages” carried out in the streets in the mid-60s, his practice has consistently demonstrated its radically critical, philosophical disposition. Buren’s visual tool 8.7-cm vertical stripes, white and colored has been continuously employed to this day and remain central to his practice. It constitutes the core axis of his numerous public projects realized worldwide, as well as his rigorous engagement with the in situ, that interrogate the structural, historical and symbolic conditions of the sites in which they are installed. These includes Les Deux Plateaux (1985–1986), widely known as “Buren’s columns”. Among his major exhibitions are The Eye of the Storm (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2005), Le Musée qui n’existait pas (MNAM, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2002) and in 2016, he realized a collaboration with the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s building designed by Frank Gehry, entitled The Observatory of Light. Closely connected to Japan where he has repeatedly visited since 1970 for the 10th Tokyo Biennale, Buren was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for Painting in 2007. Never ceasing to develop and expand the pursue, the artist continues to explore his artistic vision around the world, including a carte blanche with the Musée des Impressionnismes Giverny, scheduled to begin in July 2026, among others.

The exhibition presents new works by the artist from the Prismes et mirroirs : Haut-relief series. Colors, randomly selected from an industrial color palette, are applied to a protruding form termed Prismes which are arranged in a circular mirrored support. Extending Buren’s longstanding concern with the relationship between artwork and its environment, these works demonstrate a further deepening of his engagement with phenomena such as “light” and “reflection”. Situated between flatness and relief, painting and sculpture, the works with Prismes reflected on mirrored surfaces constantly incorporate elements of the surrounding space, including the viewers themselves - yet their own figures are absent when viewed head-on. They generate a continuous succession of visual changes, constantly sharped by their environment, ultimately provoking a critical awareness of the perceptual experience, a concern that has remained central to Buren’s practice. The stripes that the artist has referred to as his “visual tool” - discovered in the 1960s and used ever since - are applied on the sides of the triangular forms between other possibilities. The 8.7 cm bands, which combine white with another color, constitute Buren’s unchanging visual language. While shifting across media, from clothing and canvases, to posters and architectural interventions, this invariable axis of his discipline, marked by contradiction and reflection, generates innumerable variations in response to specific sites. Navigating between the in situ and the situé (movable), Buren’s persistent skepticism toward the autonomy of the artwork, together with his unwavering inquiry into the site-specificity, is further intensified through the use of his visual tools, stripped of expressive subjectivity, sharpening the work’s critical engagement with space, context, and perception.
Buren’s new works construct the exhibition space in resonance with environmental elements, such as the changing light from the high ceiling and the architecture of SCAI THE BATHHOUSE. The presence of the viewers is, of course, an integral part of this configuration. His vertical stripes - described by the artist as “an invariable sign in the midst of millions of possible things that never stop varying” - have, over the course of six decades of pursuit, emerged with renewed urgency in our contemporary post-truth era, articulated around an implicit question: What do we see?
Shaped by his initial encounter with the Japanese concept of shakkei (借景), Daniel Buren’s in situ practice - developed worldwide and also presented extensively through numerous commissioned works in Japan over the years, including those at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art - continues to reconfigure its contexts and finds renewed resonance in Japan today.