Cerith Wyn Evans

At the latest since his participation at Documenta11 in Kassel 2002 and the Venice Biennial in 2003, Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans (born in 1958) has been known to a broader audience outside the UK. The artist initially focused mainly on the medium of film, working as an assistant to director Derek Jarman and making a name for himself with experimental short films. In the 1990s, Cerith Wyn Evans expanded his artistic means of expression, making series of photographs as well as sculpture and installations that continue the engagement already present in his films with the multilayered cognitive and semiotic regularities of perception. With a large number of references to specific works from literature, philosophy, music, the natural sciences, film, and art history, and an aesthetic that is influenced by pre-pop art and the Situationist utopias of the 1960s and 1970s, Wyn Evans spins a net of useless knowledge and subjectivized-precise references. Formally speaking, he operates in his spatially expansive installations with frugal, often theatrically staged corpus of material and technology—light writing on walls, sculptural objects, and precious chandeliers which seem to communicate in a Morse Code and light signals with the beholder. In so doing he develops an aesthetic cosmos, a mental kaleidoscope in which subjective and associative processes of perception replace clarity and transparency in the mediation of information.

Cerith Wyn Evans has taken part in several major international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1995 and 2003), the Ninth Istanbul Biennial, and Documenta 11 (2002). His most recent large-scale exhibitions were held at MUSAC de Castilla y Leon (2008), Munich’s Lehnbachhaus (2007), Kunsthaus Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum (2007), and Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (2006).