Paris London Hong Kong is pleased to present Travels Thru Collage Thinking, a solo exhibition of recent work by St. Louis based artist Michael Byron. The exhibition will open on Friday, June 23, with a reception from 5 – 8pm and continue through August 5. 2023.
With an increasingly dense stacking of visual experience in contemporary culture, the question of how an artist approaches this phenomenon has never been more essential. Since collage techniques readily lend themselves to exploring this complex visual question, Byron has, since 2013, used processes in his studio practice that incorporate regional packaging material, newspaper cuttings, personal photographs, drawing scraps and other bits of found paper marvels. In Travels Thru Collage Thinking, Byron showcases these collage works alongside digitally produced multimedium paintings that approach the complex layering of cultural experience in the pursuit of a careful reflection of contemporary life.
Byron's practice has a two-fold strategy. In one facet, he uses digital and commercial printing techniques to fabricate large theatrical assemblages that run parallel to and are occasionally driven by smaller, more intimate collages. These smaller works are often records of Byron’s travel interests, specifically a focus on the intersections of culture, the personal and the political. In the last 10 years, he has produced work in hotel rooms and borrowed studios throughout the United States, Costa Rica, Europe, India, Turkey, and Croatia. He continues these travel explorations; they give him a chance to incorporate local newspapers and regional ephemera—once essential to culture and now important material nearing obsolescence. The resulting collages capture a specific place at a particular and unique moment in time. The intimacy of the collage work as documentation of time and place, and a record of complex material risk-taking, demonstrates Byron’s desire to continue driving his practice through responsive exploration, experimentation, and cultural reflection.
Born in Rhode Island in 1954, Michael Byron has been exhibiting his paintings, installations since the mid-80s and collages since 2013, in the United States and Europe. He has had solo shows in New York at Willard Gallery, Luhring & Augustine, Baron & Boisanté and Susan Inglett Gallery; in Chicago, at Phyllis Kind, Carrie Secrist Gallery and the Suburban in Oak Park, in St. Louis he is represented at Bruno David Gallery and Phillip Slein Gallery; solo museum exhibitions include St. Louis Art Museum, Forum for Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Religious Art in St.Louis, MO; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield CT, Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, TX; Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Boymans-van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, NL. His work can be found in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn NY, among others. He recently retired as the Kenneth E. Hudson Professor Emeritus of the BFA/MFA programs at the Sam Fox School of Design &Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri where he currently works and resides.
Image: Untitled Message, 2023, Mixed Medium Collage on Dibond, 48x36”
