Oliver Beer

b. 1985, United Kingdom

Oliver Beer (British, born 1985) creates sculptures, installations, videos, and immersive live performances that reveal the hidden properties and musicality of objects, bodies, and architectural sites. His social and familial relationships often become the blueprint for multidisciplinary works that engage with intimate and universal concerns, such as the transmission of musical memories and the personal and cultural meanings invested in the objects we possess. For his Resonance Project (2007‒), vocal performances stimulate the natural harmonics of built structures, creating a disarmingly visceral relationship between the audience and interior space. Beer’s sculptural practice dissects the material world and the traces we leave on it by slicing and reassembling common objects to create new meanings and forms.

The artist’s work has been the subject of many solo and group exhibitions, notably at Met Breuer, Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA PS1, New York; London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE, London; Centre Pompidou, Opéra Garnier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Palais de Tokyo and Chateau of Versailles, Paris; the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon; Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Australia; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; WIELS, Brussels and the Sydney, Istanbul and Venice biennales. Beer was part of the British Art Show 9 and has also held residencies at the Palais de Tokyo, the Watermill Centre, Sydney Opera House and the Fondation Hermès. He studied musical composition at the Academy of Contemporary Music, London; visual art at the University of Oxford; and theory of cinema at the Sorbonne, Paris.

CV