9 Arbeiten von Daniel Buren: Voile/Toile, Toile/Voile, Sail/Canvas, Canvas/Sail, Segel/Leinwand, Leinwand/Segel (20 September 1975 & 30 November 1975-7 January 1976)

Color and black & white illus. throughout. [12] leaves. Small 4to, pictorial wrappers, staple-bound. Berlin: Berliner Künstlerprogramm, 1975.


A rare Daniel Buren (b. 1938) exhibition catalogue. This show, supported by the Berliner Künstlerprogramm and Galerie Folker Skulima, was the first time Buren used sails as his canvas for works in situ. A regatta displaying the artist’s sails took place on Wannsee Lake outside of Berlin (20 September 1975). Thereafter, the sails were mounted on the walls of the Akademie der Künste (30 November-7 January 1976). This catalogue is thoroughly illustrated with photographs of the work, with text in (truncated) parallel German, English, and French. The colophon makes clear that the texts, by Bernd Mahr and Horst Merten, “were written spontaneously by two people who are not art critics or anything of the kind, but who witnessed my work in Berlin.”


The Note to the Reader declares: “All the photographs reproduced in this book are souvenirs, documents of a work. They cannot replace it. They only show how the work was carried out, and the reader is asked to remember that they can falsify it — photographs can reduce, detract, fragment, frame, flatten. Photographic reproduction of my work can only be imprecise. Finally, if there is such a thing as the ‘reality’ of photography, it is never the same as the ‘reality’ of the work photographed, and we are not concerned here with overcoming this gap.”


A fine copy of a catalogue that is now rather scarce. Ownership stamps to inside of upper wrapper and title-page.


❧ Daniel Buren’s website, “Expositions.”


Kunstmuseen Krefeld’s Künstler Bücher I exhib. cat. (1993), p. 46. (Inventory #: 8439)