Cerith Wyn Evans

Cerith Wyn Evans (born 1958, Llanelli, Wales) is a London-based conceptual artist whose practice investigates how ideas can be communicated through form. Working across installation, sculpture, photography, film, text, and sound, he first came to attention in the 1980s through experimental filmmaking and collaborations across disciplines including dance and performance. Since the 1990s, his work has increasingly focused on language, perception, light, sound, and their manifestation in space. His installations are frequently conceived in relation to specific architectural environments, using exhibition-making itself as a way of generating multiple meanings and forms of experience. Evans draws on a wide range of sources including film, music, literature, philosophy, art history, and science. Existing images, texts, sounds, and ideas are repeatedly reworked across different bodies of work, functioning as material for new configurations. Neon has been an important medium since 1994, allowing him to investigate relationships between language, light, gesture, and space. His neon works often transform fragments of literary or cinematic language into spatial compositions, while his installations also incorporate sound and other ephemeral elements. In his sculptural practice, Evans challenges the idea that sculpture must be defined primarily as a physical, permanent object, instead working with light, sound, air, and time as active materials. Sound is another significant component of Evans’s practice. For *Composition for 37 Flutes*, presented at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2018, thirty-seven glass flutes were arranged in an arc and activated to perform a composition by the artist. The work demonstrated his interest in integrating sound, light, time, and architecture into sculptural environments. The same year, Evans was awarded The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture for his significant contribution to contemporary sculpture. His work *Come (II)*, subsequently donated to The Hepworth Wakefield collection, consists of three suspended neon rings that map movement through space while framing elements of the surrounding environment. Evans has exhibited extensively internationally. Major solo presentations include exhibitions at Serpentine Gallery, London, in 2014; Museion, Bolzano, in 2015; Tate Britain, London, in 2017; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, in 2018; Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, in 2019; and Aspen Art Museum in 2021. More recent institutional exhibitions include presentations at Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo, Mostyn, Centre Pompidou-Metz, and MAAT in Lisbon, where his work was presented in 2025–26. He has also participated in major international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, Istanbul Biennial, and NGV Triennial. His practice has been recognized for its sustained investigation of sculpture, perception, and the relationships between physical and immaterial forms. In 2018, The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture recognized Evans for his important contribution to contemporary sculpture. His work is held in major institutional collections, including The Hepworth Wakefield, and continues to explore how light, language, sound, space, and time can be brought together to transform the viewer’s experience of an artwork.