Bethan Huws

Bethan Huws was born in Bangor, in northwestern Wales, UK, in 1961 and grew up bilingual (Welsh and English). From 1981 to 1985, she attended Middlesex Polytechnic and then studied at the Royal College of Art in London from 1986 to 1988.
Her works have been shown internationally in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, the Kunsthalle Bern, CH, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt am Main, the KW-Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, DE, the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, JP, Tate Britain in London, GB, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, FR. In 2003, Huws represented Wales at the 50th Venice Biennale. Solo exhibitions have been dedicated to her at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, BE (2006/07), the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2011), the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, DE, the Kunstmuseum Bern, CH (2014/15), and the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz (2024), among others.
The artist has received numerous awards, including the 1988 Art Prize of the Adolf Luther Foundation, Krefeld, Germany, and the 2006 B.A.C.A. Europe Laureate Prize at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, Belgium. From 1999 to 2000, she completed a Henry Moore Sculpture Fellowship in Rome, Italy. In 2004, she was awarded the Ludwig Gies Prize for Small Sculpture by the LETTER Foundation, Cologne, Germany, and in 2007-2008 she received a DAAD Artist-in-Residence scholarship for Berlin, Germany.
Her works are represented in the collections of Tate Britain, UK, Centre Georges Pompidou, FR, Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), DE, and the Generali Foundation Collection—Permanent Loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, AT, among others.
Bethan Huws lives and works in Paris, FR, and Berlin, DE.

Since the 1990s, Bethan Huws has been intensively exploring Marcel Duchamp, who questioned the fundamental conditions of art. Based on his realization that the selection of any object can be an artistic-aesthetic act, he began to refer to industrially manufactured products as “ready-mades” from around 1913 onwards. He concluded that these became works of art when presented in a museum context. His “ready-mades” became precedents for a new art theory, according to which art is not defined in the work itself but depends on the art context. Duchamp thus transferred the task of completing the artistic act to the viewers through their own thinking. Furthermore, he did not define the meaning of his works, but instead used puns to deliberately open up a wide range of ambiguities, ambivalences, and allusions. In doing so, he allowed for a broad spectrum of associations that continues to evolve to this day.
Bethan Huws takes up the artistic practice of Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades. The artist exemplifies this reference in her installation The Forest, 2008/09, which consists of 88 commercially available bottle dryers (ready-mades) and a bottle dryer formed from neon tubes.
Another focus in Bethan Huws' work is her intensive exploration of language. Having grown up bilingual and aware of the identity-forming power of language, this aspect plays a central role in the artist's life and work. For her multimedia language-based text and video works, Huws adapts Duchamp's artistic method of open ambiguity on the one hand, and on the other hand explores the boundaries, breaks, and poetic shifts of everyday language. In this respect, she examines the mechanisms of language and problematizes the possibilities and limits of linguistic communication in direct confrontation with the philosophy of language of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). After completing his first major work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Logical-Philosophical Treatise), in 1918 (published in 1921), Wittgenstein developed a skepticism toward terms and distanced himself from his own work due to his realization of the impossibility of a definitive definition of language. In his late Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein emphasizes that the meaning of a word is not fixed in an inner essence but manifests itself in its use in so-called “language games.”
Bethan Huws' work is based on Wittgenstein's understanding of language as an active action, a way of life, and a variable rule structure. The artist isolates words or short text fragments and uses them to mark unusual places. In doing so, she changes their context of use. (Doris Leutgeb)