Pirelli HangarBicocca presents “.... the Illuminating Gas”, the largest exhibition ever created by Cerith Wyn Evans, conceived as a harmonic composition in which light, energy and sound offer visitors a unique synaesthetic experience. Twenty-four works, including historical works and new productions, are arranged in the exhibition spaces of Pirelli HangarBicocca in an elaborate score.

The exhibition ".... the Illuminating Gas", curated by Roberta Tenconi and Vicente Todolí, presents twenty-four works, including historical sculptures, complex monumental installations and new productions, which occupy the entire volume of the more than five thousand square meters of the Navate and the Pirelli HangarBicocca Cube. The path opens with the slow and constant pulsation of seven imposing twenty-meter high light columns StarStarStar / Steer (totransversephoton) (2019). The work, created specifically for the exhibition and composed of a skeleton of tubular lamps assembled in cylinders of various heights, creates a choreography of lights and shadows that intermittently invade the space. This deployment of energy acts as a counterpoint to the sound emitted by the adjacent work, an ethereal glass sculpture also composed of transparent elements, Composition for 37 flutes (2018). From its thin reeds the air gushes out in a hiss that suggests a state of tension between the harmony of a breath and its dissolving.

Along the Navate all the elements are suspended and develop in an elaborate visual score conceived by the artist: as in a concert, the thirteen neon sculptures of the Neon Forms (after Noh) series (2015-2019) interact with the kilometric tangle of luminous lines and curves by Forms in Space ... by Light (in Time) (2017) - work originally conceived for the Duveen Galleries of Tate Britain in London and presented in Milan in a new configuration.

For the series Neon Forms (after Noh) the artist draws on the repertoire of steps, head and kimono movements or fan gestures made by the actors of the Noh theater, as they are synthesized and represented in the schemes that describe the staging of a certain role. Cerith Wyn Evans transforms them into a new look through an articulated montage that inverts, twists, mirrors, dilates, extends and overlaps them. Forms in Space ... by Light (in Time) also takes up forms used by Marcel Duchamp in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, also known as Il Grande Vetro, (1915-1923) - in particular that of Oculist Witnesses , diagram of the device used in optics to measure vision - and transforms them into light.

The very title of the exhibition ".... the Illuminating Gas " refers to the last work of the French artist, Étant donnés: 1. La chute d'eau, 2. Le gaz d'éclairage [Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas], a work on which Duchamp worked for twenty years from 1946 to 1966, which represents an enigmatic diorama visible only through the hole in the center of a door.