Cerith Wyn Evans's Illuminating Gas at HangarBicocca

Cerith Wyn Evans's exhibition …the Illuminating Gas at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan is one of the most complex and extraordinary shows ever staged at the venue. The central nave appears to explode, dissected by sabers of light, columns, and planetary motions. The show features 25 works, including historical sculptures, complex installations, and new productions, with site-specific interventions using ephemeral materials like light and sound, centering on temporal perception. The artist, born in Llanelli, Wales in 1958 and living in London, spoke about his experience preparing the show. He visited previous exhibitions at HangarBicocca, including those of Mario Merz and Lucio Fontana, finding Fontana's work more ascetic and closer to his own research. He described the space as a cathedral without faith, a temple of a forgotten religion, and expressed uncertainty about occupying it after those masters. The exhibition includes a new configuration of Forms in Space… by Light (in Time) (2017), originally for Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries, and StarStarStar/Steer (totransversephoton) (2019), a site-specific work that opens the show with a choreography of light and shadow. Evans's works draw from literature, music, philosophy, photography, poetry, art history, astronomy, and science, translated into neon, fireworks, or light pulses, and into sculptures referencing historical artists like Marcel Duchamp or Noh theater gestures, as in the Neon Forms (after Noh) series (2015-2019).