Daniel Buren found a pattern in 1965 (an 8.7 cm-wide stripe that was on a bolt of awning fabric) and has continued to work with it for almost sixty years. The specificity of the stripes is not meant to be read as content but as a visual tool. Over the years, Buren has created interventions using these stripes in, on, and out of various materials. These interventions only work when they are “in situ” as the materials have to interact with the space in which they are placed, with the interaction itself resulting in the work. The gestures Buren makes address questions of the way space can be used, appropriated, and revealed in its social and physical nature.

Sometime over fifty years ago, Daniel Buren made a large 250 x 630cm (approximately 8 x 20 feet) fabric work that consisted of sewing together five lengths of awning fabric so as to continue his 8.7 cm wide stripe pattern seamlessly. Wherever that fabric was sewn together, the artist painted a white stripe, partly to cover the stitching. For many years, this large work sat folded in the artist’s archives. In 2017, Buren cut the work into thirty regular triangular elements, all while keeping detailed records of each new piece’s location in the original work.

For these thirty new works, the artist specified that it is the responsibility of the exhibitor to install whichever piece(s) are desired to be presented in their original position, i.e. at the same height and position on a chosen wall surface as where that “part” of the original work would have been positioned. For the current exhibition, each wall in the gallery has been treated as an individual site and thus seven of the works are presented in three ways on the three exhibition walls of the gallery.

As in all of Buren’s works, these works balance tensions between assumptions, awareness, extrapolation, and interpolation, all while complicating the relationship between art and the structures that frame it.