Forms in Space… by Light (in Time)
October 5, 2025–February 16, 2026
The artistic practice of Cerith Wyn Evans (b. 1958, Llanelli, Wales) is defined by its exploration of the interactions between art, language, and technology. Over the course of his career, Wyn Evans has created works that combine light, sound, text, space, and movement, conveying a creative approach that transcends various media – sculpture, drawing, installation, and video – to challenge the viewer's perception and sensory experience.
Sérgio Mah, the curator, says: “Wyn Evans’ work is characterised by extraordinary aesthetic refinement and technical precision. It also draws frequently on literary, philosophical, scientific, and artistic references, which the artist fruitfully transposes through quotations and by appropriating pre-existing elements (drawings, objects, musical compositions, sentences), reconfiguring them to open up new fields of aesthetic and poetic resonance.”
This exhibition marks Cerith Wyn Evans’s first solo exhibition in Portugal, bringing together a collection of around 30 works produced between 1994 and 2025. Without a pre-established route, the exhibition allows visitors to wander freely. “It thus creates a unique experience that encourages multiple perspectives and viewpoints from above and below, a play of vision and perceptual and sensory stimuli that gradually reveal themselves over time,” says the curator.
The exhibition takes its title from a monumental work that dominates the Oval Gallery: Forms in space … by light (in time) (2017), Cerith Wyn Evans’s largest sculpture to date. With almost two kilometres of neon tubes, it forms an immense and complex multidimensional design. The work combines several recurring ideas and references in the artist’s work, such as Les Témoins oculistes, the geometric designs that Marcel Duchamp included at the bottom of Le Grand Verre (1915–1923), or drawings inspired by kata diagrams, which outline the codified movements of the ancient Japanese theatrical tradition known as noh, in which movement is radically stylised and simplified. Measuring over 30 metres, it is a work without a front or sides, inviting multiple points of entry and experience. “If anything, it’s a zone of meditation and a place for reverie on the transference of energy” (Interview with Louisa Buck, The Art Newspaper, March 31, 2017).
Also at the Oval Gallery, StarStarStar/Steer (Transphoton) VI e III (2019) reveal a complex sequential lighting system, between a state of transparency, when the light goes out, and one of intense, dazzling brightness. The light is programmed to vary at a rate similar to our breathing. As the brightness slowly dims, the columns change appearance, allowing viewers not only to see through them but also to observe the materials they are made of.
At Gallery 1, the set of white neon pieces Neon after Stella (Seven Steps) (2022) is inspired by the famous Black paintings series (1958–1960) by painter Frank Stella, a paradigm of a new trend in abstract painting, which began to favour geometric patterns, repetition, monochrome, and the objectual nature of painting. Evans considers Stella’s paintings to be musical scores, transcribing them into a different physical and visual reality. The faint white lines of the paintings are transmuted into the affirmative bands of the light tubes. The dominant pictorial black is elided—it becomes empty, a transparent interstice. In this way, Cerith Wyn Evans realises the negative of the Black paintings.
More on view at MAAT
Miriam Cahn: What looks at us
Curators: João Pinharanda and Sérgio Mah
Until October 27, 2025
Kiluanji Kia Henda: Coral of bodies without North
Installation and performance as part of BoCA – Biennial of Contemporary Art
Until November 3, 2025
Fluxes: 7th Lisbon Architecture Triennale
Curators: Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and John Palmesino, Territorial Agency
Until January 19, 2026
Pencils for colouring grey days*: Works from the EDP Foundation Art Collection
Curator: Margarida Chantre
Until January 19, 2026
