Artists

Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, James Lee Byars

Press release

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.