Daniel Buren: 7 Farben für einen Schornstein / Sept Couleurs pour une cheminée

The French conceptual artist Daniel Buren, born in 1938 in Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris, has written art history since the 1970s with his nomadic practice of "in situ" with a repertoire of images that is as abstract and concrete as it is iconic. Buren always uses the same 8.7 cm wide vertical stripes, varying in just a few colours, to transform squares, rooms, staircases or chimneys into works of art through colour interventions. Wherever these stripes are, there is Buren. Since 2013, the colours aquamarine, strawberry red, yellow-green, sky blue, melon yellow, signal violet and traffic yellow, arranged vertically from bottom to top in monochrome rings, have made the almost 302-metre-high chimney of the now decommissioned northern cogeneration plant of eins energie in sachsen in Chemnitz visible from afar by day and, thanks to an illumination with LED lights expanded in 2017, also at night. Buren placed his famous vertical stripes like a self-quotation around the plateaus of the surrounding maintenance balconies, which also separate the colour rings of 7 colours for a chimney.

The special aesthetic of the industrial city of Chemnitz inspired many artists, such as the expressionists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who grew up in Chemnitz and founded the legendary artists' group "Die Brücke" in Dresden in 1905 with Erich Heckel, who was born in Döbeln, and Fritz Bleyl, who was born in Zwickau. However, it was not Dresden's colourism, but the "unhealthy" colourfulness, the angular buildings and people of the industrial city of Chemnitz that allowed the Expressionists to develop their unmistakable painterly expression. Chimneys and factory buildings characterise Kirchner's 1926 painting "Chemnitz Factories" or Martha Schrag's "View of the Suburb of Kappel, Chemnitz" from 1930, which are shown in the exhibitions of the Chemnitz Art Collections. And so Buren's work makes it clear from almost every point in the city that this Chemnitz is a city of art. And here's a secret: the second colour from the top initiated the name of the PURPLE PATH art and sculpture trail.

(Text: Alexander Ochs / Ulrike Pennewitz)