Bix Lye

Biography

Bix Lye was born in London in 1937, the son of the kinetic artist and filmmaker Len Lye. He was named after the jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. The family moved to New York in 1945.

He studied at Boston University and at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he concentrated on sculpture. For years he shared a studio with his father on Greenwich Street, and he worked as a specialized carpenter to support his practice. His compact, minimalist sculptures, built in separate sections from epoxy, Masonite and Lucite, drew notice early.

He was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture in 1964 and again in 1968. After many years in Brooklyn he became a regular presence at Holland Tunnel Gallery. He showed with the Dutch painter Jan Mulder in Double Feature (2006), which The Brooklyn Rail's Shane McAdams reviewed, and with the abstract painter Thornton Willis in Matter of Fact (2022) in Newburgh.

His work was also in the gallery's 2014 Framed project, its 2018 Newburgh opening and its 25th-anniversary show. He died in Newburgh in January 2023, and the gallery described him as an integral part of the Holland Tunnel family.

Practice. Small, table-top sculptures assembled from modular sections of industrial materials (epoxy, Masonite, Lucite), combining crisp geometry with saturated color and a sense of play. The Brooklyn Rail wrote that his work 'simultaneously reads as a contained, solid object and a construction of modular components' (Shane McAdams, 2006).