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Cerith Wyn Evans

Lives and works in London
B. 1958

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Cerith Wyn Evans' conceptual practice explores the way that ideas can be communicated through form, incorporating a diverse range of media including installation, sculpture, photography, film and text. He began his career as a filmmaker producing short, experimental films and collaborative works, but since the 1990s has created artworks that deal with language and perception, focusing with precise clarity on their manifestation in space. Evans employs strategies of exhibition making that are often site-specific, viewing exhibitions as a catalyst to produce a reservoir of possible meanings and discursive experiences.

His poetic work derives its refined aesthetic from a wide range of influences including film, music, literature and philosophy. Visual or textual sources and ideas are often repeated across different bodies of work, an indication of his desire to keep ideas in play or to bring them back to life as raw material for future use. He harnesses the potential of language to create moments of rupture and delight, where desire and reality conjoin, evident in his series of firework sculptures where wooden structures spell out open-ended texts and fleetingly burn over a designated period of time. These performative sculptures exist only as a durational event, but take on new life when documented through photographs or film. Likewise, in an ongoing series of neon text sculptures, he uses favourite passages of text or the subtitles from films to create open-ended, powerful works that produce a retinal after-image in the viewer.

Evans attempts to disrupt existing systems of communication, either through the practice of subverting certain given material forms, by altering spatial-temporal coordinates, or by adopting a communal rather than a singular authorial voice. In film and slide installations, for example The Curves of the Needle (2003), he manipulates sound to form a parallel ‘text’ to the visuals, where meaning is opened up by the unexpected slippage that occurs when the soundtrack is dislodged, changed or removed. With his series of chandelier sculptures he transforms these potent symbols of material wealth – whether minimal designs, modernist masterpieces or coloured, venetian glass antiques – into transmitters of morse code. The morse code, which is a translation of texts dictated by an adjacent computer, fills the room with a captivating otherworldly dance made of light and shadow.

Cerith Wyn Evans was born in 1958 in Wales and lives and works in London. He has exhibited extensively including solo exhibitions at Aspen Art Museum (2021), Pirelli HangarBicocca (2019), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2018); Duveen Galleries Tate Britain, London (2017); Museion, Bolzano, Italy (2015); The Serpentine Gallery, London (2014); TBA-21 Augarten, Vienna (2013); Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2011); Tramway, Glasgow (2009); Inverleith House, Edinburgh (2009); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain (2008); Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (2006); and Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2005). He has participated in the 57th Venice Biennale (2017); 4th Moscow Biennale (2011); 12th Venice Biennale of Architecture (2010); 1st Aichi Triennale, Japan (2010); 3rd Yokohama Triennale, Japan (2008); 9th Istanbul Biennial (2005); and 50th Venice Biennale (2003). In 2018 Evans won the Hepworth Wakefield Prize for Sculpture with his monumental work ‘Composition for 37 Flutes’, 2018.

Exhibitions

Gallery Exhibition

Cerith Wyn Evans

….)( of, a clearing

21 January – 26 March 2022

Hong Kong

Gallery Exhibition

Cerith Wyn Evans

No realm of thought… No field of vision

7 February – 1 August 2020

Bermondsey, London

14 May – 29 August 2022

Northwich, Cheshire, UK

21 January – 26 March 2022

Hong Kong

6 May 2020 – 7 April 2021

Online

7 February – 1 August 2020

Bermondsey, London

30 November – 8 December 2019

18 July – 25 August 2018

Hong Kong

11 July – 2 September 2018

Bermondsey, London

27 September – 12 November 2017

Bermondsey, London

23 September – 15 November 2015

Bermondsey, London

28 September – 17 November 2012

Hong Kong

12 October – 27 November 2011

Bermondsey, London

8 July – 28 August 2010

Hoxton Square, London

14 April – 22 May 2010

Mason’s Yard, London

4 April – 10 May 2008

Hoxton Square, London

30 November 2007 – 12 January 2008

Hoxton Square, London

7 July – 9 September 2006

Hoxton Square, London

20 April – 19 May 2006

Hoxton Square, London

16 July – 21 August 2004

Hoxton Square, London

31 October – 6 December 2003

Hoxton Square, London

15 April – 1 July 2000

Hoxton Square, London

19 April – 25 May 1996

Duke Street, London

Museum Exhibitions

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Museum Exhibition
Cerith Wyn Evans at Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo

20 July 2023 - 8 January 2024 | Japan

Museum Exhibition
Cerith Wyn Evans at NGV International

Melbourne, Australia

Museum Exhibition
A solo exhibition by Cerith Wyn Evans opens at Mostyn

8 October 2022 - 5 February 2023 | Wales

Museum Exhibition
Cerith Wyn Evans at GAMec, Bergamo

15 October 2021 - 13 February 2022

Films

Beyond White Cube

Roberta Tenconi on Cerith Wyn Evans '....the Illuminating Gas'.

Roberta Tenconi, Curator at Pirelli HangarBicocca discusses Cerith Wyn Evans' exhibition “....the Illuminating Gas” (2019 – 2020).

Beyond White Cube

Roberta Tenconi on Cerith Wyn Evans '....the Illuminating Gas'.

Roberta Tenconi, Curator at Pirelli HangarBicocca discusses Cerith Wyn Evans' exhibition “....the Illuminating Gas” (2019 – 2020).

In the Gallery

Keiji Haino inside Cerith Wyn Evans' exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey

This short film records experimental Japanese musician Keiji Haino during a one-off performance inside Cerith Wyn Evans' exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey.

News

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Commission
Cerith Wyn Evans Saint Laurent Commission

Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Paris

Commission
Cerith Wyn Evans at Karlskirche

31 January 2024 | Vienna

Biennial
Cerith Wyn Evans at the NGV Triennial

19 December 2020 - 18 April 2021

Artist Talk
Cerith Wyn Evans in conversation with Briony Fer

25 February 2020

Prints & Multiples

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Cerith Wyn Evans - …peal (I) - 1

Cerith Wyn Evans
…peal (I)
2020

£1,200

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Cerith Wyn Evans - …peal (II) - 1

Cerith Wyn Evans
…peal (II)
2020

£1,200

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Cerith Wyn Evans - 3.7.15 - 1

Cerith Wyn Evans
3.7.15
2015

£800

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Bookshop

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Publications

Cerith Wyn Evans (2023)

£39.95

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