Conceptual artist Daniel Buren beautifully dresses up the Frank Gehry-designed building in colour this spring
This May the beautiful and monumental Louis Vuitton Foundation building is becoming a much more colourful experience than ever before. It’s thanks to French conceptual artist Daniel Buren, who has covered the recognisable exterior ‘sails’ of the building, formed of 3,600 pieces of glass, in a staggering array of coloured filters. The thirteen selected shades will make coloured shadows appear and disappear, creating an ever-changing experience fluctuating with the time of day and the season. Ttitled Observatory of Light, the project is developed in close dialogue with the building –designed by American architect Frank Gehry, whose acclaimed work includes the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
Since the 1960s, minimalist Daniel Buren has by use of his “visual tool” (8.7 cm-wide alternating white and coloured vertical stripes) worked with transforming space and its context. This is not the first time Buren is collaborating with Vuitton. His work "Les Deux Plateaux" – an arrangement of columns in a grid-like fashion in the courtyard of the Palais Royal in Paris – provided the initial inspiration for the brand’s AW13 collection. This led to Buren creating a site-specific installation for the runway show, and being commissioned to work on the season’s campaigns and windows displays.
In parallel with the Observatory of Light project, BurenCirque will be setting up camp across from the Foundation, for three exceptional performances of a new show titled 3 times a Hut. Devised in the early 2000s by Daniel Buren together with Dan and Fabien Demuynck, pioneers of contemporary circus, BurenCirque is a multidisciplinary project in which new talents, national and international, are invited to interact with features created by Daniel Buren.
Observatory of Light opens May 11th and the 3 times a Hut shows will be performed on June 2nd, 3rd and 4th 2016.
