Oliver Beer

Oliver Beer is a visual artist and composer whose sculptures, paintings, installations, videos and immersive live performances reveal the hidden properties and innate musicality of objects, bodies and architectural spaces. Rooted in his background in both musical composition and visual art, Beer’s work draws on social and familial relationships to explore universal themes such as the transmission of musical heritage or the personal and cultural significance we assign to the objects we possess. For his Resonance Project (2007–), Beer composes vocal performances that activate the natural harmonics of built structures, creating a disarmingly visceral connection between the audience and the surrounding space. His Resonance Paintings translate musical harmony into visual form by using sound to vibrate scattered pigment over his canvases, capturing the ‘shapes of sound’ and pushing the boundaries of abstraction with a painting method that uniquely merges auditory and visual expression. 

Beer’s work has been exhibited in major institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and MoMA PS1 in New York; London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE; the Centre Pompidou, Opéra Garnier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Palais de Tokyo, Musée d’Art Moderne, and Château de Versailles in Paris; the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon; Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Australia; Ikon Gallery in Birmingham; WIELS in Brussels; the West Bund Museum and The Long Museum in Shanghai; as well as the Sydney, Istanbul, Lyon, and Venice biennales. Beer was part of the British Art Show 9 and has undertaken residencies at Villa Albertine, Palais de Tokyo, Watermill Centre, Sydney Opera House, and Foundation Hermès. 

Oliver studied musical composition at the Academy of Contemporary Music in London, Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and film theory at the Sorbonne in Paris.