The paintings exhibited here in the gallery represent the first works in which Buren started using a pre-printed fabric to express his vision. Up until this point, the artist had been painting colored shapes, specifically stripes, on various fabrics and colored bed sheets. In September of 1965, while in a Parisian market, Buren found different kinds of commonly used pre-printed striped fabrics, including one with alternating white and colored stripes. Buren realized this was the perfect medium in which to create his work, reducing his paintings to their simplest visual and physical elements and ridding them of allusion or subjectivity. Each stripe has a standard width of 8.7cm and was limited to the colors green, yellow, blue, red, orange, brown, and black interspersed with equidistant white bands. Given these standardized limitations, Buren varied the size and proportion of the canvases. He would then apply white painted lines or scalloped patterning at the edges of these canvases to differentiate his work from a readymade. The artist was able to break down the paintings to the very basic components of the work – a partly painted surface, a support and its surroundings.

a history of striped awnings
- bill 11-07-2009 2:30 pm [add a comment]