James Lee Byars

More than three decades after his last institutional exhibition in Italy, Pirelli HangarBicocca’s retrospective dedicated to James Lee Byars gathers large-scale works, created from 1974 to 1997, in which precious and refined materials, such as marble, velvet, silk, gold leaf, and crystal, are harmoniously combined with minimal and archetypal geometries, like prisms, spheres, pillars, and Baroque-like objects, in a play of symbolic and aesthetic cross-references between form and content.

The retrospective features works coming from international museum collections that have rarely been exhibited, and that are presented in Italy for the first time. Beginning with multiple allegorical and formal meanings of matter, the exhibition dwells on themes that have run through the artist’s practice such as the search for perfection, doubt as an approach to existence and the finitude of the human being, inviting visitors to reflect on the alchemical potentialities of art to shape reality.