Ensemble

Byars wrote letters day and night, and they have become an important part of his artistic legacy. The first time they were exhibited was in the ‘Lettershow’ at the Gerber Gallery in Berne in 1975, for which Byars collected his letters sent to correspondents all over the world. His conscious upgrading of letters as artworks befitted an era of communication and information exchange. Byars’s letters, sent from wherever he had just landed, are mostly conspiratory or provocative in content, in order to convince the receiver to help him realise a project.