Cerith Wyn Evans
take my eyes and through them see you
20 September – 29 October 2006
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall
London SW1
Phone: 44 20 7930 3647
The ICA is delighted to present the exhibition take my eyes and through them see you by the highly influential artist and filmmaker Cerith Wyn Evans.
Although his background is predominantly in filmmaking, which clearly informs and shapes his work to this day, he also harnesses an impressively wide knowledge of literature, philosophy, music and photography to create a unique and distinctive artistic vernacular. His erudition is both implicit and explicit as he creates works whose outward simplicity and elegance disguises radical and complex socio-political content. Philosophical and literary influences are most evident in his series of language-based works that contain remnants of ideas proposed by significant avant-garde movements of the Twentieth Century from Surrealism to Conceptual art and are marked by an extreme minimal beauty which on closer inspection reveal deeper, more troubling content. His sculptural ‘chandelier’ pieces for which he is probably best known – conceal a personal canon of literature from the last century including poems, letters, short stories and philosophy – the texts being transmitted through Morse-code translated into pulsing light bulbs.
For this exhibition, Wyn Evans has conceived a set of entirely new works in direct response to the history, location and architectural particularities of the ICA. take my eyes and through them see you is also an opportunity for the artist to examine a personal relationship with the institution, which has played an important role in his development. He first visited the ICA as a teenager in the mid 1970s where he came to see Marcel Broodthaers last exhibition Décor, which included Broodthaers legendary piece La Bataille de Waterloo (The Battle of Waterloo), 1975. The exhibition, with its overtly critical content had a tremendous effect on Wyn Evans and will be referenced within some of the new works made for the ICA.
Wyn Evans graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1984. He began his career as a video and filmmaker and worked as an assistant to the filmmaker Derek Jarman. During the 1980s Wyn Evans made short experimental films that have been screened in the UK and abroad (his first exhibition at the ICA entitled A Certain Sensibility was a month long series of Super 8 film screenings at the then newly opened Cinematheque, 1979). He has also collaborated with choreographer Michael Clark, Leigh Bowery, Throbbing Gristle, The Smiths and The Fall among others.
Wyn Evans solo and group exhibitions include Tate Britain, London (2000), Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland (2001), Documenta 11, Kassel (2002), Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley (2003), White Cube, London (2003), Camden Arts Centre, London (2004), Kunstverein Frankfurt and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2004), Kunsthaus, Graz (2005), The Conservatory, Barbican, London (2005). Most recently The Curves of the Needle, a touring installation developed by the BAWAG Foundation, Vienna (2005), of which Wyn Evans contribution went on to show at White Cube (2006) and in which something happens all over again for the very first time, Musée dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, (2006).
take my eyes and through them see you has been curated by Jens Hoffmann, Director of Exhibitions, and Rob Bowman, Curator of Exhibitions.
A limited edition artists publication will be produced on the occasion of the exhibition.
Institute of Contemporary Arts
Open daily 12 – 7.30pm
The Mall
London SW1Y 5AH
Phone: 44 20 7930 3647
Fax: 44 20 7306 0122
Email: info@ica.org.uk
