Daniel Buren has spent more than six decades questioning where an artwork begins and where the surrounding world enters into it. Internationally renowned for his unmistakable 8.7cm vertical stripes, the French artist has transformed this seemingly neutral motif into a rigorous conceptual tool, using it to expose the architectural, historical and symbolic conditions of every site he inhabits. This spring and summer, Scai Piramide in Roppongi presents ‘Situated Works 1966-2013’, a rare survey spanning nearly fifty years of his practice.
The exhibition traces Buren’s evolution from his early, radical interventions of the 1960s to luminous optical-fiber works produced in the 2010s. Historical pieces such as Peinture aux formes variables reveal the moment when the striped industrial fabric first became his defining visual language, while the Five Elements paintings, originally created for a 1989 exhibition in Nagoya, demonstrate his persistent dismantling of expressive authorship and painterly convention.
In later galleries, Buren expands this inquiry through works integrating LED-lit optical fibers, where colour and light become spatial phenomena rather than fixed surfaces. Their shimmering presence underscores the artist’s long-held conviction that colour is the irreducible core of visual experience. Deeply connected to Japan, Buren here appears as an artist whose disciplined investigations continue to sharpen our perception of space itself.
