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PRESS RELEASE

OLIVER BEEROMA

12 SEPTEMBER – 24 OCTOBER 2020

Oliver Beer’s exhibition Oma presents a new sound installation alongside sculptural wall works that are steeped in musical inheritance and exchange.

Following the artist’s solo exhibition Vessel Orchestra at the Met Breuer, New York in 2019, the exhibition transforms the Ely Gallery into a space where the sacred and domestic seem to intermingle. Centred around the installation of an early twentieth-century Steinway pianola (a self-playing piano), the work fills the gallery with a deeply personal piece of music composed in old age by the artist’s grandmother, Oma, transcribed and re-performed by Beer for this exhibition.

Featuring the artist’s first circular ‘Two Dimensional Sculpture’ alongside new works that, for the first time, introduce a kaleidoscope of colour, Oma marks Beer’s second exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac London, following his solo presentation as part of the inaugural programme when the space opened in 2017.

Drawing on his background in both music and fine art, Beer’s practice explores the relationship between sound and space with a particular focus on the voice and architecture. Within and alongside his work with sound, Beer creates subtle and diverse sculptural, installation and film projects that are autobiographical yet also touch upon universal, often intimate, concerns.

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The artist’s social and familial relationships often feature in his multidisciplinary practice, forming the lens through which he explores different strands of individual and collective experience. Extending beyond personal history, Oma considers the connective potential of music passed between generations and cultures, as well as the discriminatory social history of music as a field that is inaccessible to many parts of society.

Born in 1913, Oma was forbidden any form of musical education by her father, who was himself a professional violinist. She made her first composition at the age of 87, which – unable to transcribe herself – she communicated to her grandson through a combination of singing and drawing. Transcribed by Beer into a dense graphic score in blue ink, Oma’s musical textures and tones are presented as both a visual translation and an immersive musical experience. These works represent a continuation of the artist’s interest in the transmission and exchange of music, while considering the barriers to access his grandmother faced – forms of discrimination that continue to this day.

Although my grandmother’s story and this intimate moment of musical exchange seems rooted in the past – she was born in 1913 – the sentiment behind it is still very relevant in the 21st century when music is both a force of inclusion and exclusion. I wonder what music my grandmother could have made if the patriarchal society of her day had not excluded her from mainstream musical culture, and I feel conflicted about how Oma’s music has only now become audible through me. Even today only 17% of registered professional music writers in the UK are women, according to the Performing Right Society. The decisions we take now about who has access to music will change the cultural

landscape of the 21st century.

– Oliver Beer

A scroll of perforated sheet music visibly circulates through the pianola’s centre, annotated with a text recounting Oma’s story in her own words and the script of her hand. Topped with an eclectic selection of objects, many of them musical objects from Oma’s home, the installation references both the domestic mantlepiece and a votive shrine. The wall behind the piano features a salon-style hang, including the graphic musical score that heightens the sense of an altarpiece or a metaphorical portrait, charged with a notable absence.

Hanging from the ceiling, Beer presents two new ‘vessels’– humble yet beautiful objects drawn from Oma’s life that each emit a unique musical tone. Building on his work with the collection of The Metropolitan Museum in New York, for the first time the objects shown are activated by the viewers’ presence: the pitches that naturally resonate within each vessel are amplified in real time by microphones and speakers, rendering audible their pure and unwavering tones.

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On the gallery walls, a series of new ‘Two Dimensional Sculptures’ develop Beer’s technique of transforming three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional images. Evoking altarpieces or reliquaries through their hinged format, the new works have all been made from objects that either belonged to Oma or resonate with her life.

For the first time in Beer’s practice, the works on display can be opened and closed, revealing and concealing internal forms within an elusive white cube space. These hidden forms include Oma’s engagement ring – which she intended for Beer’s future wife, before knowing that he was gay – as well as the artist’s great-grandfather’s metronome, fossilised in resin and frozen in time. Flattened and embedded within the resin, the surgically sliced objects can be viewed from multiple perspectives simultaneously, while the introduction of the hinged format allows them to be returned to their original whole, although only when closed, silenced and out of sight.

As the artist observes, the presentation of musical objects and artefacts in this way allows the viewer to perceive a world beyond the surface, ‘to hear with our eyes and see with our ears’. Soundwaves travel directly through matter, in comparison to light which stops upon contact with a solid surface. In an act of simultaneous destruction and preservation, the sculptures invite the viewer to literally open each object and reveal its inner form – its nature, its quality, its geometry, and the area through which sound travels – or to close it upon itself, returning it to a silenced whole.

Sound is a sculptural presence which is entirely contingent on form, time, geometry and space. If you look at objects from an acoustic perspective, they can start to reveal things that we wouldn’t have realised had

we been observing them purely visually.

– Oliver Beer

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The gesture of opening and closing, or of silencing and giving voice, reverberates throughout the exhibition: in the artist’s act of bringing Oma’s music to life, in the visitor-activated resonance of the hanging vessels and their absence-induced silence, and in the notion of transforming reliquaries into portraits, not only of the artist’s grandmother but also of the numerous unheard, unarticulated and stifled female voices of the twentieth century.

Beer’s hinged ‘Two Dimensional Sculptures’ present a number of objects that, beyond offering a personal insight into his grandmother’s life, interrogate the barriers of access to music and their historical positioning: Oma’s piano, which she was never able to play; her coloured pencils brought together in an energetic scramble of pigment; the walking stick that for years lent her support; and an amateur’s guide to conducting written by Imogen Holst CBE (1907 – 1984). Holst was an educator, conductor and ambassador for the development of English musical education, working as a ‘music traveller’ for the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (a forerunner of the Arts Council). However, she remained in the shadow of her male associates and was not recognised as a conductor in her own right during her lifetime. Another sculpture houses the memoir of pioneering Jazz drummer Dottie Dudgion, who defied convention as the first female to enter the male-dominated world of 1960s and 1970s American Jazz clubs, inspiring generations of musical women, including Oma.

In his ‘Recompositions’, Beer brings together an eclectic array of items drawn from Oma’s home to form an abstracted, unconventional portrait of her life, embodied in the material histories of their previous existence. Also invoking representations of music in the history of art, a number of these pieces reference famous paintings or musical figures from the past. Recomposition (The Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia), 2020, for example, follows The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia, c. 1518, by Renaissance master Raphael. The patron saint of musicians, Cecilia was famous for experiencing musical ecstasies. In Raphael’s painting, she appears with broken and unstrung instruments at her feet, which are referenced through Beer’s inclusion of deconstructed musical objects such as the violin – traditionally associated with the female form – alongside fragments of a metronome and Oma’s piano.

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The largest work in the show, Recomposition (Women Playing Music, after Kitagawa Utamaro), 2020, references the Japanese woodblock print by Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806), Women Playing Music on a Balcony. Following the same structural composition, Beer’s piece substitutes the three women from the original with instrumental fragments, including a cello, organ pipe, violin, metronome and one-string fiddle, popularised during the Edwardian era and used by amateur violinists in the twentieth century.

Oma first appeared as a subject in one of the artist’s earliest works – Oma’s Kitchen Floor, 2008 – in which her linoleum kitchen floor was transformed into a monumental hanging sculpture, its marks of wear and tear bearing witness to half a lifetime of movement within the domestic space.

Oliver Beer (b. 1985, lives and works in London and Paris) studied musical composition at the Academy of Contemporary Music before reading Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and film theory at the Sorbonne, Paris. He creates sculptures, installations, videos, and immersive live performances that reveal the hidden properties of objects, bodies, and architectural sites. Drawing on his musical training, his social and familial relationships often become the blueprint for multi-disciplinary works that engage with intimate and universal concerns, such as the transmission of musical memories and the personal and cultural meanings invested in the things we possess. For his Resonance Project (2007– ), vocal performances stimulate the natural harmonics of built structures, generating a disarmingly visceral relationship between the audience and interior space. By slicing and reassembling common objects to construct new meanings and forms, Beer’s sculptural practice dissects the material world and the traces we leave on it.

Beer’s work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, notably at the Met Breuer, Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA PS1, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Palais de Tokyo and Chateau of Versailles, Paris; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; WIELS, Brussels and the Sydney and Istanbul Biennales. Beer has also held residencies at the Palais de Tokyo, the Watermill Centre, Sydney Opera House and Fondation Hermès.

I could hear textures and dynamics and harmonies in my mind’s ear … If I had been allowed to study music, perhaps I would have had the musical language to write the actual notes. But I know how I wanted the music to feel.

– Oma

ABOUT THE ARTIST

IMAGE CREDITS 1. Installation view. 2. Oma’s Music (detail), 2020. Pianola with ink on paper score, framed. Score: 113 x 83 x 4 cm (44.49 x 32.68 x 1.57 in). Pianola: dimensions variable. (OB 1298). 3 & 4. Installation view. 5 & 6. Engagement, 2020. Gold ring, sectioned and set in resin; gesso. Open: 9.5 x 19.5 x 2.8 cm (3.74 x 7.68 x 1.1 in). Closed: 9.5 x 9.3 x 5.5 cm (3.74 x 3.66 x 2.17 in). (OB 1290). 7. Hidden Inside Mountains, 2020. Metronome, sectioned and set in resin; gesso. Open: 24 x 27 x 6.5 cm (10.63 x 2.56 x 9.45 in). Closed: 24 x 13.5 x 13.5 cm (9.45 x 5.31 x 5.31 in). (OB 1282). 8. Recomposition (The Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia), 2020. Fragments of the artist’s grandmother’s piano, coloured pencils, chess pieces, books about music, laughing gas canister, paintbrush, violin fragments, metronome fragments, violin bow, sectioned and set in resin; gesso. Open: 89 x 69.5 x 2 cm (35.04 x 27.36 x 0.79 in). Closed: 89 x 34.5 x 4 cm (35.04 x 13.58 x 1.57 in). (OB 1289). 9 & 10. Recomposition (Women Playing Music, after Kitagawa Utamaro), 2020. Fragments of the artist’s grandmother’s piano, cello, coloured pencils, paintbrush, chess pieces, domino pieces, organ pipe, metronome fragments, laughing gas canister, books about music, tobacco pipe, violin fragments, bag pipe, one-string fiddle, sectioned and set in resin; gesso. Open: 132.5 x 100 x 3.9 cm (52.17 x 39.37 x 1.54 in). Closed: 132.5 x 50 x 7.8 cm (52.17 x 19.69 x 3.07 in). (OB 1295). All photos by Eva Herzog. © Oliver Beer.

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