Art on the Underground has announced that French artist Daniel Buren will create a new permanent installation for the Oxford Street entrance and ticket hall for the upgraded Tube station at Tottenham Court Road, scheduled to be completed in 2016.
Buren will create a colourful series of large scale diamond and circle shapes fixed to the station’s internal glass walls. Designed in his trademark striped vinyl, the shapes will allow light to pass through to keep the public areas bright. A cabinet containing the ‘parents’ of the forms that are transforming the station’s surfaces – a set of Buren’s shapes in sculptural, 3D form – will be installed in the ticket hall.
Buren’s is the second piece of permanent artwork to be installed at Tottenham Court Road station, complementing the 1984 mosaic designs by the late Eduardo Paolozzi. The majority of the Paolozzi mosaics are being preserved in the upgraded station, whilst some smaller sections will be carefully removed and displayed elsewhere.
Buren has over 2,000 artworks worldwide using stripes and geometric forms to frame public spaces. Les Deux Plateaux, or Les Colonnes de Buren (Buren’s Columns), a 3,000 m² area of variously truncated, striped columns, was installed in the great courtyard of the Palais Royal, Paris in 1986. The installation provoked intense debate over the integration of contemporary art into historic buildings. Buren’s most recent work is a temporary piece for the new Turner Contemporary in Margate. Borrowing and Multiplying the Landscape focuses the viewer on the site where JMW Turner once painted, framing the view through the vast sea-facing window. Buren has traced a huge circle on the glass and then ‘filled in’ the gaps in the square window with transparent yellow, striped vinyl deckchair like stripes.
Images: Daniel Buren. Tottenham Court Road (architect’s visualisation Hawkins Brown)
AAJ Press 
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