Artist Talk: Daniel Buren on Stripes and Sails

In September 1965, conceptual artist Daniel Buren (France, b. 1938) left the Marché Saint-Pierre, a textile market in Paris, with ten meters of linen preprinted with stripes—white alternating with colors—launching a new chapter in his then-young career. Over the following five decades, he has utilized stripes in his work—on paintings, wheat-pasted posters, protest signs, banners, and sailboat sails. In conversation with Walker curator Pavel Pyś, he discusses his practice, from these earliest experiments to a signature project that made its US debut at the Walker this summer: Voile/Toile–Toile/Voile (Sail/Canvas–Canvas/Sail), a group of nine striped sails, installed in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden’s Cowles Pavilion in the order their accompanying sailboats finished in a June 23 regatta in nearby Bde Mka Ska.