Daniel Buren writes on his friend Robert Ryman to highlight some questions raised by his oeuvre and by his own work.
Co-founder of the BMTP group, Daniel Buren (born 1939 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France) is a major figure on the international art scene. He made a name for himself on the art scene in the 1960s. In 1965, Daniel Buren settled into an approach based on a striped canvas with alternating white and coloured, 8,7 cm‑wide stripes. The introduction in late 1967 of what he called a “visual tool” laid the foundations for a practice that broke with tradition and opened up a multifaceted body of work in which freedom was born, as the artist likes to point out, out of both internal and external constraints. Daniel Buren explored this “visual tool” by developing it on a flat surface and, from the end of the 1960s, in three dimensions.
