Michael Werner Gallery, London is pleased to present Everyone is an Artist, an exhibition of major works by three titans of 20th century art, Joseph Beuys (b. 1921 in Krefeld, Germany, d. 1986 in Düsseldorf), Marcel Broodthaers (b. 1924 in Brussels, d. 1976 in Cologne), and James Lee Byars (b. 1932 in Detroit, d. 1997 in Cairo). Contemporaries and collaborators, Beuys, Broodthaers, and Byars adhered to a similar broad set of ideas: art cannot be separated from life, an object can create narrative, and art is activated by the imagination of the viewer. Everyone is an Artist charts and interweaves the oeuvres of these three highly influential artists as they reshaped how art was created and perceived in the 20th and 21st centuries.
“Everyone is an artist” is a direct quote from and a guiding principle of Beuys. Coming out of World War II, Beuys cultivated a body of work based on personal history, and potentially myth, about his Nazi plane crashing over the Crimean front in Ukraine and his rescue by a nomadic tribe of Tartars. Through the use of ‘actions’ and objects linked to his personal story, Beuys evoked collective memory and healing. Throughout his life, Beuys believed that art was not a career separate from society, instead creativity and the need to express it are essential to being human.
First a poet, Broodthaers launched into visual art in 1964 through his first gallery solo show at Galerie Saint Laurent in Brussels titled I, too, wondered whether I couldn’t sell something and succeed in life, in which he presented his unsold poetry books encased in plaster. Broodthaers’ brief, but consequential, output in visual art used language and everyday objects loaded with societal and personal meaning to question the validity of cultural memory, history, and institutions.
The work of Beuys and Broodthaers is transcendent in the work of the slightly younger Byars. Both Beuys and Broodthaers supported Byars’ career, and each participated in his performances. In Byars, Beuys and Broodthaers saw the refinement of their ideas. A shaman-like figure, Byars saw life, and therefore art, as defined by impermanence. To him, objects were vessels to present expansive and existential themes, including beauty, perfection, and death, and the viewer is essential to shaping their meaning. Byars’ work informed the direction of conceptual art in the latter part of the 20th century and continues to resonate with artists today.
Everyone is an Artist includes Beuys’ iconic “Jason” and “SåFG”, Broodthaers’ important installation “Dites partout que je l’ai dit”, and Byars’ pivotal “The American Flag” and “The Figure of Death”. The exhibition presents a rare opportunity to see these three seminal artists in direct dialogue with each other.
Joseph Beuys’ work had an enormous influence on the development of post-war art and has been collected and shown widely around the world. In 1986, Beuys was awarded the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize by the city of Duisburg, Germany. Major retrospectives have been mounted by the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1979); Kunsthaus Zürich (1993); Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (1994); Centre Pompidou, Paris (1994); Tate Modern, London (2005); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009); M HKA, Antwerp (2017); and K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2010 & 2021); among others.
Marcel Broodthaers created several groundbreaking exhibitions during his brief career, most notably Eulogy of the Subject at Kunstmuseum Basel and The Angelus of Daumier at Centre Pompidou, Paris. “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles”, a major work that occupied Broodthaers from 1969 to 1972, was included in documenta 5 in Kassel. Broodthaers died in Cologne in 1976, leaving behind an ambitious body of work that would speak to subsequent generations of artists and which remains highly relevant today. London’s Tate Gallery presented the first posthumous retrospective of the artist in 1980. Important posthumous museum exhibitions include Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1981); Kunsthalle Bern (1982); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1989); Galerie National du Jeu de Paume, Paris (1991); Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1992); Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (1997); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2001); Kunsthalle Wien (2003); Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (2012); Fridericianum, Kassel (2015), The Museum of Modern Art (2016); Museo Reina Sofia (2016); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2017); and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2018).
James Lee Byars has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions worldwide, including The Palace of Good Luck, Castello di Rivoli / Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (1989); The Perfect Moment, IVAM Centre del Carme, Valencia (1994); The Palace of Perfect, Fundaçao de Serralves, Porto (1997); Life Love and Death, Schirn Kunsthalle and Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg (2004); The Perfect Silence, Whitney Museum of American Art (2005); 1/2 An Autobiography, MoMA PS1, New York and Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2013-2014); The Golden Tower, Campo San Vio, Venice (2017); The Perfect Kiss, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (2018); and The Perfect Moment, Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2021). Earlier this year, a major survey of Byars’ work was on view at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan and is currently on view at Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid (closing 1 September 2024). Byars is also the subject of a dual exhibition titled Invisible Questions that Fill the Air: James Lee Byars and Seung-taek Lee at Palazzo Loredan, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Venice, curated by Allegra Pesenti (closing 25 August 2024).
Everyone is an Artist opens to the public on 20 September with a private view on 19 September from 6-8pm.
Portraits: Left: Joseph Beuys. Photo: Horst Ossinger. Middle: James Lee Byars. Photo: Lina Bertucci. Right: Marcel Broodthaers. Photo: Philippe De Gobert.