French artist presents major exhibition at Carriageworks

Carriageworks has announced that acclaimed French conceptual artist Daniel Buren will present a large‐scale work as the fourth major international artist project in the Schwartz Carriageworks series. Daniel Buren will travel to Sydney to present the Australian premiere of his work Like Child’s Play, free to the public at Carriageworks from 7 July until 12 August 2018.

Internationally recognised as one of France’s foremost contemporary artists, Daniel Buren (b.1938) has exhibited more than ten times at the Venice Biennale, winning the Golden Lion in 1986, and his work has been the focus of exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York. Buren’s career spans five decades of unforgettable interventions, controversial critical texts, thought­‐provoking public art projects and engaging collaborations with artists from different generations.

Carriageworks Director, Lisa Havilah, said: “This seminal installation by Daniel Buren at Carriageworks represents an opportunity for Australian audiences to experience the work [of] one of France’s most renowned conceptual artists in Australia.”

Anna Schwartz, Director and Founder of Anna Schwartz Gallery, commented: “I am delighted to see a major exhibition of the work of one of the most important artists of our generation realised in Australia at Carriageworks for the next Schwartz Carriageworks project.”

The installation at Carriageworks, Like Child’s Play, is inspired by German educational theorist Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel’s famous children’s wooden block toys. Buren’s work features more than 100 upscaled blocks, arches, triangles and pediments. The work plays with scale so that objects, that as children, we towered over, now dwarf us.

The very first presentation of this project was at Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg (France) in 2014.

Buren arranges the works to create sight lines through the space. When we look into the void of one object we are looking through a tunnel made of several blocks lined by Buren’s iconic stripes, each 8.7 centimetres wide, which the artist has featured in his work since the mid-1960s. While half the exhibition space is a riot of colour, this is juxtaposed with the minimalist look of the other half with its white floor and white blocks.

Throughout his career, Buren has created artworks that complicate the relationship between art and the structures that frame it. His work questions how we look and perceive, and the way space can be used, borrowed, and revealed in its social and physical nature. The neat geometric forms of Buren’s work will sit against the vast scale of Carriageworks.

carriageworks.com.au