About the Work
Daniel Buren works 'in situ', and his stripes recur in a wide variety of contexts. The artist devised the four-part work 'Une peinture en 4 parties et 2 lieux pour 2 collectionneurs' for mounting at two different locations, as laid down in a certificate. At the beginning of his career as an artist, he painted the 8.7-centimetre-wide stripes on canvas; in the mid-1960s, however, he changed over to ready-made fabrics. The outer stripes are painted by the artist himself and mark the origins of his works in painting. Unlike the paintings of Abstract Expressionism, Buren's works are not autonomous, but are dependent in each case on their specific environment.
About the Acquisition
Since the 1960s, our donors have shared an interest in contemporary art. In 1971, Paul Maenz and the musicologist Gerd de Vries founded a gallery for modern art in a back courtyard in Cologne. This establishment was to become one of the most successful international galleries of the 1970s and 1980s. Among the artists it represented was Daniel Buren. Heimar Schröter, on the other hand – a resident of Frankfurt – remained active in advertising, the field in which Maenz had originally worked.
