A WORK OF ART WITHOUT EMOTION IS NOT A WORK OF ART. The statement, which Bethan Huws, born in 1961 in Bangor, Wales, and now living in Paris and Berlin, will realize as a neon writing for the Kunst Museum Winterthur, is to be understood programmatically, even if the artist herself immediately questions the prominent statement: ARE YOU SURE? The two-part neon work commissioned by Galerieverein will connect the two buildings of the museum visually and intellectually. To celebrate the inauguration of the work and to integrate the publicly accessible work into Bethan Huws’ oeuvre, the Kunst Museum Winterthur will present two essential aspects in the artist’s multimedia and conceptual oeuvre: Works on Paper / Word Vitrines.
Works on Paper: Bethan Huws’ watercolors are of an incomparable tenderness and vulnerability. The act of drawing is also one of personal memory. It can be a reminiscence of certain places or things. The artist concentrates her memory images in such a way that they receive something universal, or that they cross the boundaries to abstraction. Parallel to this, delicate abstract structures emerge as a further strand of drawings, which subtly divide the picture surface. The Word Vitrines are commercially available metal boxes with glass front and black rear wall, which serve as information, for example as a price and offer overview in a restaurant. The artist plays these everyday objects with short texts, transforming them into complex linguistic images.
Bethan Huws’ work has been exhibited worldwide since the early 1990s, including in 2006 at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht and in 2016 in Kolumba, the art museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne. The Kunst Museum Winterthur focuses specifically on two essential aspects of her work. The exhibition is divided into two parts in order to additionally emphasize the connection between the two exhibition venues: ARE YOU SURE?