MICHAEL J. BYRON

MICHAEL J. BYRON (USA, 1954).
"Notte. Amsterdam, 1991.
Oil on canvas.
Signed, titled, dated and located on the back.
Size: 50 x 40 cm.
Michael J. Byron is an American visual artist. He holds a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Byron currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where he is a professor of art at Washington University. Byron had his first solo exhibition in May 1982, an installation entitled "For the Nun" at Artists Space, NYC. His work was included in the group exhibitions Social Spaces, 1988, and demonclownmonkey, 2002. He had solo and group exhibitions in other venues over the next two years, culminating in his participation in An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984. From 1984 to 1989, Byron continued to work and exhibit in New York City, as well as in gallery exhibitions in the United States and Europe. After participating in the 1989 Whitney Biennial, Byron moved to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where he lived and worked for five years. His other exhibitions include: As Far as Amsterdam Goes, 1985, at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam: the Musee Départemental d'Art Ancien et Contemporain, Epinal, France, 1992, and the 43rd Biennial of Contemporary American Painting at the Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C. in 1993. In 1997 Byron participated in group exhibitions at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, The Magic of Numbersin Stuttgart, Germany, and in The City Series at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art: St. Louis, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and in April 2000, in the exhibition "Deja Vu" at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, New York. Solo museum exhibitions include the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1987, and a joint exhibition sponsored by the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and the Boijmans-van Beuningen Museum, both in Rotterdam, in 1991. In 1996, a group of paintings entitled Short Stories was exhibited in the St. Louis Art Museum's contemporary solo exhibition programme. The Amitin Notebook project was first shown at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis from November 2001 to February 2002, and travelled to the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Texas Museum of Art in Houston from June to September 2002. Also worth mentioning is the exhibition entitled "Cosmic Tears", which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art in St. Louis in September 2009.