SEOUL.- British artist Oliver Beer’s first exhibition in Korea, Resonance Paintings – Two Notes, presents an immersive new body of work, built around the ideas of duality, fusion and exchange and expressed through what the artist calls ‘the intrinsic relationship between physical form and musical harmony’. Music is the basis of Beer’s creativity and worldview, so he experiences daily life and art from a musical perspective. – Kyoungran Kim, Curator, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

Subtle geometric blue and white paintings created by physically using ‘sound as his paintbrush’, surround the viewer and are mirrored in Beer’s Resonance Vessels – a sculptural sound installation suspended in the centre of the gallery space. Informed by the vessels on view, the live performance Composition for Mouths, which presents the union of two human bodies fused into a single vocal instrument, open and punctuate the exhibition.

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, he creates diverse sculptural, installation and film projects that are often autobiographical, yet also touch upon universal concerns. Through his reinterpretation of sensory experience from a contemporary perspective, Beer analyses, deconstructs and reassembles the viewpoints and methods entrenched within old customs and cultural codes: the act of composing, the way we compose, how we perform, how we make paintings and sculptures, and how we experience beauty and our own existence.

Translating musical harmony into a visual language, Beer’s Resonance Paintings are created by positioning a speaker beneath a horizontally oriented canvas on which dry, powdered pigment has been scattered. By playing the notes extracted from the Resonance Vessels, the canvas vibrates moving and shaping the pigment – visual representations of the sound waves appear on the surface in undulating, geometric patterns, which are subsequently frozen in place using a unique fixing technique that the artist has developed. This recent innovation in the artist’s practice has its origins in his early experiments from 2009, when he first placed a handful of flour on a vibrating Irish drum and discovered the geometric nature of sound. By carefully composing the notes with his attuned musical ear, the artist has built a vocabulary of precise abstract forms that allows him to create paintings from blue pigments.

Music and harmony are made from geometric vibrations in the air. If you put loose pigment onto the surface of the canvas and play music underneath it, the air moves the pigment into the shape of that sound. The beauty of this, for me, is that suddenly every musical harmonic can be expressed visually, and these new paintings allow us to literally see the shape of music. I’ve always worked at the meeting point of music and visual art and these paintings allow me to compose images by composing sounds. What is more striking still is how this imagery born of harmony so rapidly starts to resemble the language of 20th and 21st century abstract painting, and how far these sounds can take us visually. — Oliver Beer

Specially created for the exhibition in Seoul, the Resonance Vessels draws on techniques used in Beer’s sound installations at the Met Breuer, New York in 2019 and at the Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello during the 2022 Venice Biennale. Suspended from the ceiling with microphones positioned at their openings, the blue-and-white ceramic vessels remain silent until a visitor approaches and triggers a movement sensor – as the microphones are activated viewers are prompted to become aware of their own presence, volume and motion in the air surrounding the works. As you amble inside this space moulded by the artist, you can feel the airflow at various points and hear the sound of your movements with your whole body. – Kyoungran Kim, Curator, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

Blue and white ceramic vessels have been specifically selected by the artist for this exhibition for their historical and geographical characteristics as well for the precise musical notes at which they resonate. Imported from Persia through China during the Joseon Dynasty these objects represent paths of cultural exchange and interaction at a time when cobalt pigments were more expensive than gold. The technology of cobalt oxide began in Mesopotamia, travelled to Turkey, arrived in China, reached Japan and, through Portuguese, Dutch and British imperialism, made its way all over the world. It has now become part of this common visual language that we all share. If you follow the journey of this simple aesthetic you follow a story of imperial and commercial exchange; and with every vessel ever exchanged there has always been a musical note. — Oliver Beer

At a time when the meeting of bodies – culturally, socially and musically – has been circumscribed and transformed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the performance Composition for Mouths takes on new significance. First staged at the Sydney Opera House for the 21st Biennale of Sydney in 2018, the piece transforms the performers’ bodies into acoustic spaces as they become a vessel of resonance. Joining their lips in a tight seal to create a single mouth cavity, the singers explore the resonant frequencies of each other’s faces as well as the architecture. At the meeting point of the two voices, a third voice appears. — Oliver Beer

Drawing on a recurrent theme in Beer’s practice, the ‘survival of objects’ will return in this exhibition with a display of Two-Dimensional Sculptures whose sound has been frozen in time. Made of broken vessels, many of which are blue and white to echo the pair of ‘singing’ objects in the main gallery space, these sculptures have been created using transparent resin that Beer has tinted with black pigment. The latter allows him to control the light flow touching the vessels to create both a sense of depth and the illusion of flatness. These elusive pieces traverse the boundaries between mediums, seeming both like photographic scans, paintings and sculptures.

Until they were broken, they [the vessels] were also singing constantly and would have kept on singing forever, well beyond our capacity to hear them. The resin pieces become a way of freezing in time something as fragile and fleeting as sound. — Oliver Beer

Visual and musical resonances link the works across media in the exhibition, with an emphasis on cultural and musical exchange as a unifying force. For me, this show in Seoul is hopefully a cathartic return to being able to exchange air and ideas and music with each other. — Oliver Beer

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, Brusselsand the Sydney and Istanbul Biennales. Beer has also held residencies at the Palais de Tokyo, the Watermill Center, Sydney Opera House and Fondation Hermès.