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Email PageByars 2006
April 29, 2006- June 24, 2006
James Lee Byars
Mary Boone Gallery
541 W 24th StNew York, January 4, 2006—Mary Boone, Perry Rubenstein, and Michael Werner Galleries announce their collaborate survey of the career of James Lee Byars (1932–1997). This unique project filling six individual galleries will span more than forty years of artistic production in a variety of mediums, by one of the most influential artists of the second half of the twentieth century. Scheduled to open April 27, 28 and May 17, 2006, the exhibition is curated by independent curator and scholar Klaus Ottmann, who recently organized an important retrospective for the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Germany, and is the curator of the 2006 International SITE Santa Fe Biennial. This will be the largest and most comprehensive presentation of Byars’s works in the United States providing an opportunity for the public to see for the first time works never or rarely seen in the United States, among them, late, monumental-scaled installations, and early paper and cloth objects.
Last year’s exhibition of Byars’s work at the Whitney Museum, organized by Chrissie Isles, was critically acclaimed and presented a select group of the artists works in the context of more recent American art.
This is opportune time to look at James Lee Byars’s career, whose life and work was essentially performance, as increasingly artists and curator are looking back at some of the important art forms that emerged in the 60s and 70s. Byars’s works remain uncategorizable, even though they encompass art, performance, theater, and philosophy. Byars was an artist known for creating works extreme in their formal simplicity and materially luxuriousness. A reflection of his lifelong pursuit of the transient nature of beauty and perfection, his art is a synthesis of the conceptual, the theatrical, minimalism and Eastern philosophies. Operating on both a perceptual and conceptual level, Byars’s work enfolds the viewer in the physical experience of a concept that is abstract by nature.
Among the highlights of the exhibition will be Byars’s The American Flag (1974), one of the artist’s most important silk cloth objects, used in his short 8-mm movie and performance, Two Presidents, also on view; his large–scale, gold-leaf sculpture, The Spinning Oracle of Delphi (1986), first shown at the 1999 Venice Biennale; and Concave Figure (1994), one of Byars’s final works, consisting of five concave columns of white marble from the Greek island of Thassos, known for the exceptional purity of its marble. Also of interest will be a selection of Byars’s 1960s black-ink paintings, the result of an extended residence in Japan, including a painting, long considered lost, that Byars had sold to MoMA curator Dorothy Miller on the occasion of his one-person exhibition there in 1958. Such works provide an overview of themes and materials central to Byars’s work, an artistic legacy that remains an inspiration to new generations of artists today.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Byars spent the formative years of his artistic career in Japan where he studied ceramics and papermaking, inspired by the elegance and economy of traditional Noh theater. It was during this time in the late 1950s to early 1960s that he came to value the ephemeral as an essential artistic quality and adopted the ceremonial as an enduring principle in his life and work. Better known during his lifetime in Europe and Japan than in his native country, Byars’s achievements are yet to be fully appreciated in the United States.
Art Reviews of Byars 2006
| New York Times June 9, 2006 | Holland Cotter | "...It is tempting to fit Mr. Byars into existing slots: performance art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, whatever. But, like the European artists to whom he felt closest, Marcel Broodthaers and Joseph Beuys, he resists this. His extravagance and his privacy combine to keep him outside the fold, making him too precious for some, too inscrutable for others...." |
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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