One of Buren's Experiencing duration exibits at the 2005 Lyon Biennial. Photograph: Pascal Fayolle/EPA
The idea of Paris as a training ground for emerging artists is an age-old cliché, but the reality is that France has lagged behind as an incubator of contemporary art for decades. Burdened by their city's historical greatness, few French artists alive today have garnered first-rank international attention. But this year France is performing the very un-French act of swallowing its pride and asking for help from England in spotlighting its most prestigious and promising living artists. The result is a season of solid eyeopening and uplifting exhibitions.
Paris Calling is a six-month exchange program between French and British sponsors in which more than twenty major galleries, museums and art centres in London, Oxford and Margate are hosting exhibitions, including eleven new commissions, by prominent French artists. Showcased in this series is Bertrand Lavier at Bloomburg SPACE, M/M at the V&A, and the Pierre Huyghe exhibit at Tate Modern, which closed in September.
Perhaps the most interesting is Daniel Buren's show of two large-scale installations and drawings on view at Modern Art Oxford through January. This is Buren's first exhibition in the UK in over twenty years and his second show in Oxford since 1973, but he has clearly mastered the space. Buren has become one of France's most celebrated artists, site-specific installations inside and away from established exhibition spaces. The 87mm-wide white and coloured stripes they feature have been his signature since he appropriated the design from a commercial fabric he discovered in 1965 when browsing through a Montmartre flea market.
Cubes of colour upstage the stripes at MAO, where Buren took the three large windows in the upstairs exhibition area, covered portions of the glass with transparent coloured Perspex, and then duplicated the patterned windows - suspending the copies in three rows across the gallery. When clear, bright English daylight enters the gallery, the results are a simple, gorgeous combination of a classic French aesthetic and this prototypical English setting.
Paris called to catch up. Let's hope they stay in touch.
