Opinion
Daniel Buren Shows His True Stripes
THE DAILY PIC: At Nahmad Contemporary, Daniel Buren, master of stripes, is shown achieving his mastery.
Blake Gopnik
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THE DAILY PIC (#1648): The French artist Daniel Buren is famous for a four-decade commitment to using the ready-found stripes from awning canvas as his signature device. An astonishing show at Nahmad Contemporary in New York traces the 18 months or so in the mid-1960s when that commitment was born. We watch the stripes migrate from being hand-painted motifs on the surface of his abstractions, to being a hand-painted patterning that sits mostly in their background, to being a hand-painted, barely visible white addition to the edge of a canvas that is – at last – stretched from actual teal-on-white awning fabric.
The entire history of Western art only rarely lets us in on a genesis sequence like that. (Artworks courtesy the artist and Bortolami, New York)
For a full survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.
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