1971

White and Red Painting

French, born 1938

White and Red Painting exemplifies Daniel Buren's signature style of white and colored vertical stripes that he initiated in the 1960s. Moving away from a traditional understanding of painting, he put these stripes on many kinds of supports: on canvas, on museum walls, and even on city streets and other public spaces, perhaps most famously at the Palais Royal in Paris. Buren focuses on the positioning of his paintings rather than on the exploration of their formal qualities, and while the form of his works remains consistent, each piece is distinct because it responds to its particular context. The artist asked that White and Red Painting be placed in the very center of the wall at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The result is a piece that responds to the scale of the architectural space around it and questions the place of art both literally and metaphorically.