Lucy Skaer, Untitled, 2005/6
Daniel Buren, Untitled, 2006

Lucy Skaer
Born 1975, Cambridge - United Kingdom
Lives and works in Glasgow

Skaer studied at the Glasgow School of Art. Much of her work consists of her interacting with, and changing, public spaces. Her works on paper are large stretches of paper that, in scale, resemble unfurled banners, flags or giant scrolls. When pinned to the wall, meticulously drawn and painted imagery is revealed. Yet the imagery is often ambiguous and is not always what it first might seem.
Transformation and camouflage are central to her practice. Her main source of reference is archived and printed material, images loaded with political and cultural baggage, which, through a process of tracing and merging with other pictorial and factual motifs, become distanced from their original source, opening a space for alternative interpretations.

Daniel Buren
Born 1938, Paris - France
Lives and works in Paris

Throughout his career Daniel Buren has radically questioned the nature of art and the systems that support and manipulate it. At the same time, he has successfully worked within the institutions that are an integral part of this cultural machine. Buren began painting in the early 1960s and after a short but prolific period of experimentation with this medium, the artist discovered the striped material that would become his signature. By 1965 the artist had begun making paintings with linen pre-printed with alternating bands of white and colour. By reducing his paintings to their simplest visual and physical elements, emptying them of all illusion and subjectivity, Buren questioned the traditional expectations of the form, though he often applied acrylic to the outermost white stripes to differentiate the fabric from a found object. His interest in the literal components of the work, which consisted of both surface and support—the recto and verso—would lead him to explore aspects (both material and ideological) of a work of art that are not visible: what conventional painting, in fact, masks.