Lee Byars James Biography
James Lee Byars was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1932 and died in Cairo in 1997.
Among the most recognized American artists from the 1960s to today, Byars is one of the most legendary artistic figures of the last century, he has shaped his character and his career as a continuous performance, in space and time.
In his thirty-year career, he has created a singular language by associating motifs and symbols from Eastern cultures, such as elements of Noh theater and Zen Buddhism, with his profound knowledge of Western art and philosophy. Interested in oriental philosophies and religions, James Lee Byars spent a long time in Japan, where he went numerous times between 1957 and 1967, teaching English to Buddhist religious people. Through the use of different media, such as installation, sculpture, performance, drawing and speech, the artist explored the boundaries between body and spirit, to reflect on the concepts of community and mysticism through ephemeral actions, the direct involvement of the public, and large-scale interventions.
In 2023 Pirelli HangarBicocca dedicates the first Italian retrospective to James Lee Byars with a vast selection of emblematic works, which harmoniously blend geometric and minimal shapes with refined and unusual materials such as marble, velvet, precious woods and gold leaf.
