"La Façade aux acacias" Daniel Buren

Paris is enriching its urban landscape with a new creation by renowned French visual artist Daniel Buren. Designed specifically at the request of Reiffers Initiatives to celebrate the fifth edition of its mentoring program, this work is part of the overall redevelopment of Rue des Acacias. Buren transforms architecture into an artistic medium and challenges the viewer’s perception of urban space.

For this 2025 mentorship exhibition, Daniel Buren introduces us to two in situ works that are particularly representative of his practice. First, “La Façade aux acacias” creates a series of large isosceles triangles across the entire endowment building using his famous white stripes measuring 8.7 cm in diameter. Exactly sixty years ago, in September 1965, Daniel Buren discovered at the Marché Saint-Pierre in Paris a fabric for blinds with alternating white and colored stripes that would change his life—and also that of the visual arts. These vertical white and colored stripes became the artist’s distinctive trademark, always 8.7 cm wide. The façade, thus dressed and cut in a zigzag or staircase pattern, extends from the diagonal line drawn from the window to the top of the building. With “Nouvelles images du ciel”, Daniel Buren this time intervened on the building’s glass roof, applying a series of colors to each pane in an immutable order: the alphabetical order of the colors in French available industrially for the opaque material chosen. The colors change successively from blue to yellow, pink, red, green, and so on, offering a view of the sky transformed by the play of light and color.