June 10 – August 8, 2015, 313 Dosan-daero, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, http://www.313artproject.com/
Daniel Buren is a well-known minimalist artist (with his “some color + white stripes” brand). I just noticed his name when walking on Gangnam’s Dosan Daero and popped into the gallery space.
The shop window worked the best and it was the place where I could feel a direct dialogue between the architecture and the artwork: The transparent glass with transparent + black stripes and the mosaique-like square on a white wall behind it.
Upon entering the gallery and walking around the two floors, this symbiosis with architecture (which Buren often stresses) did not fully materialize. The objects, assembled from a mixture of glass mirrors and glossy plastic, looked more like pieces of furniture: Arranged neatly in equal distances around the perimeter wall.
Obviously there is a long established kinship between minimalist art and design furniture, so it is not so surprising to get this impression. Donald Judd sculptures also closely resemble Ikea shelves. With Judd/Ikea there is more emphasis on the material itself and objects are made from a single material like wood or metal. Buren’s objects from plastic and mirror materials, thus represent more of a ‘maximalist’ version of minimalism, and they resemble Italian design brands like Kartell. Also, the materials used by Buren associate mainly with night club and restaurant interiors in my mind.
In the installation, I felt a bit disturbed by the human-like scale of the sculpture and I kept hesitating whether it was Buren’s primary intention to make the objects approximately 2 meter tall or whether it is a side effect of the ‘human scale’ of the building (making the sculptures big/small enough to fit into the 2.5 m high space and be easily transported in and out. Maybe my hesitation only reflected the objects hesitation whether to grow a bit more or to contract a bit more. If the objects completely connected floor to ceiling, their relation to the space would be straightforward, but maybe it was Buren’s aim, to present objects of ambiguous surfaces and ambiguous dimensions.
