Oliver Beer was born in 1985 in Pembury (United Kingdom). A composer by training, he studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art from the University of Oxford (United Kingdom). He also followed the Film and Audiovisual Studies masters at the University Paris-Sorbonne (France). He lives and works in London (United Kingdom) and Paris
In 2009, he won the Saatchi Gallery's New Sensations Prize. He has held numerous artist residencies including at the Pavillon of the Palais de Tokyo (2011), at the Saint-Louis glassworks with the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès in 2012 and at the Villa Arson (along with artist Shingo Yoshida) at the end of December 2013.
Both a musician and an artist by training, Oliver Beer is particularly interested in architecture and the principle of resonance. Since 2007 he has been developing the Resonance Project, a series of performances and films which work with this acoustic phenomenon. Experimenting with the interaction between architecture and the voice, he has created an
impressive modular sculpture into which the visitor is invited to enter.
An entire floor of the museum is dedicated to the solo exhibition of young British artist, Oliver Beer. This will feature a new work (Rabbit Hole) created by the artist, following on from The Resonance Project, complemented by certain pieces displayed to the public for the first time.
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The animated film entitled Alice Falling (From the series Reanimation), made from children’s drawings of Alice falling into the rabbit hole, tumbling into a fantastic universe.The disorder is reinforced by a frieze of objects which seem to be drawn, but are in fact very real: cut through the middle and embedded in the wall. A reference to the March Hare cutting a cup in half to give Alice «half» a cup of tea, it is also the inscription into the wall of objects related to the loss of volume or the passage of air (a pipe, a revolver ... ).
Combining references to his own life (his grandfather’s pipes and cane, the rifles of which his father is an avid collector ... ), the history of art, the history of music… the exhibition offers us an oscillation between illusion and reality, memories and relics, an immersion into the curious world of Oliver Beer.
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Titre
Alice Falling
During his residency at the Villa Arson, Oliver Beer began a somewhat unusual project—the reconstruction, image by image, of an extract from Walt Disney’s Snow White (1937). Students from 23 primary schools in the Greater Nice region participated in this project by producing some of the 700 drawings necessary for the reconstruction of the animated film. Alice Falling (from the series Reanimation) follows the same idea and reconstructs a scene from Alice in Wonderland : the fall into a well.
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Titre
Rabbit Hole
Experimenting with the interaction between architecture and the voice, Oliver Beer has created an
impressive modular sculpture into which the visitor is invited to enter. This structure vibrates through the intervention of opera singers who perform a score created specifically for the exhibition.
![Vue de l’exposition Oliver Beer, Rabbit Hole. Œuvre British Bulldog [Leg Side], 2014](/sites/mac/files/2020-06/expo_Oliver_Beer_1.jpg)
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Titre
British Bulldog
What seems at first a drawing is, in fact, a sculpture so finely embedded in the wall that it gives the illusion of being flat. Oliver Beer’s three-dimensional piece, inlaid in the wall, is a humorous and thoughtful transposition of the power of illusion.
