DANIEL BUREN | Fare, Disfare, Rifare

From 8 March to 27 July 2025, Palazzo Buontalenti will host a major exhibition dedicated to Daniel Buren, one of the most important voices on the international art scene. The show, titled DANIEL BUREN. Fare, Disfare, Rifare. Lavori in situ e situati 1968-2025 (DANIEL BUREN. Make, Unmake, Remake. Works in situ and situated works 1968-2025), is organised by Fondazione Pistoia Musei with support from Fondazione Caript and in collaboration with Galleria Continua. It is curated by Daniel Buren and Monica Preti, director of Fondazione Pistoia Musei, Fondazione Caript’s organisation for art and culture.

Exploring the work of the French artist, who was born in Boulogne-Billancourt in 1938, the exhibition invites visitors to discover ten rooms and the inner courtyard of the palace, featuring a selection of paintings made between 1965 and 1967, two Cabane from 1985 and 2000/2019, a few recent light works and high-reliefs, a room devoted to sketches for works made in Tuscany and works specially created/recreated for Pistoia Musei. The exhibition looks at the way Buren transforms architectural spaces through the use of form, colour and materials to create a continuous and lasting dialogue between art and environment.

The exhibition focuses particularly on Daniel Buren’s tie with Italy and Tuscany, presenting works made in Italy that the artist has revisited and recreated in a continuous process of Making, Unmaking, Remaking. With this idea, Buren questions and reformulates his own work, giving new meaning to projects created in Italy between 1968 and today and inviting viewers to reflect on the transformation of art over time and in different contexts.

The signature feature of Daniel Buren’s art is the motif of vertical stripes, alternately white and coloured and always 8.7 centimetres wide. An industrial fabric that he first started using for paintings in 1965, he returned to it after 1967 for works made in urban contexts and in institutional or non-institutional places of art and culture. This rigorously simple visual device became his outil visuel, or ‘visual tool’. In the 1970s, he began creating three-dimensional, works using materials like printed fabrics, paper, glass, mirrors, wood, Plexiglas and more. Buren describes this practice as ‘in situ’, and it is an approach that rejects the independence of the works, which are closely tied to the features, both physical (space, architecture, materials) and cultural (history, tradition, community), of the places in which he creates and installs them.

Palazzo Buontalenti will be the heart of the whole exhibition, which will extend to Pistoia Musei’s other locations, where new, specially-created works will be on view, and the surrounding area, which will host works that were created by Daniel Buren starting in the new millennium, such as Three-coloured fountain walls for a hexagon (2005–2011) in the park of Villa La Magia at Quarrata and La Cabane Éclatée aux Quatre Salles (2005) in Gori Collection – Fattoria di Celle in Santomato di Pistoia.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a varied programme of related events for all audiences and a catalogue (published by Gli Ori editori contemporanei) that will include an interview with Daniel Buren by Monica Preti.