Cerith Wyn Evans’ (b. 1958, Llanelli) artistic practice incorporates 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. Since the 1990s he has created artworks that consider language and perception, focusing with a precise clarity upon their manifestation within a space, as can be seen here throughout Mostyn’s lower and upper galleries.
The works exist and take form through the reflection on and interrogation of the world about us, adopting what he identifies as “strategies of refraction…. of juxtaposition, superimposition and contradiction…occluding and revealing” to create moments of rupture within existing structures of communication, whether visual, audible or conceptual. For this exhibition he has focused on ideas around the folds and flows of energy via material and immaterial conduits, circuitry, and choreology:- the practice of translating movement into notational form. Wyn Evans engages with the site of the gallery to produce works which question our notions of reality and cognition, of perception and subjectivity…the exhibition as a meditation, an experiment with fluid recourse to scores, maps, diagrams and models…
Intricate neon sculptures interrogate the means of perception and question how we interpret the works and their spatial surroundings which are used to construct meaning. The visual assemblage presented in concert throughout the galleries unfolds in a sort of ‘controlled randomness’, in which artworks coexist in a play of exchanges between intervals and intensities. Neon works are suspended and isolated in space, seven-metre high light columns descend from the ceiling like a subliminal forest of thought, suspended windscreens are mobile, and transparent glass panes reverberate with a soundtrack defined by relations constantly in flux.
Acknowledgements
The exhibition is curated by Alfredo Cramerotti, Director, Mostyn, with the assistance of Kalliopi Tsipni-Kolaza, Associate Curator of Visual Arts, Mostyn, Robert Grose, Exhibitions Manager, Mostyn, and Cecily Shrimpton, Head of Operations, Mostyn. The project is generously supported by the Colwinston Charitable Trust, White Cube, Marian Goodman Gallery, Neonline, Dr Carol Bell, Salisbury & Co. and Ellis Williams Architects, along with core funding support from Arts Council of Wales, Conwy County Borough Council and Llandudno Town Council.
Cerith Wyn Evans would like to personally thank Eric Alliez, Pascale Berthier, Irene Bradbury, Stephen Farrer, Tom Foulsham, Lukas Galehr, Daniel Gallego, Nicola Lees, Takayuki Mashiyama, Nicolas Nahab, Ilona Noack, Jacob Noack, Stefan Rigger, Josef Schöfmann, Freyja Sewell, Jessica Simas, Robert Spragg and Johnathon Titheridge.
About Artist
Cerith Wyn Evans was born in 1958 in Wales and lives and works in London and Norwich. 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.