Oliver Beer studied in music composition at the Academy of Contemporary Music in London before attending the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University and studying film theory at the Sorbonne in Paris. This musical training is reflected in his live performances, films, installations, paintings and sculptures, which reveal the hidden acoustic properties of objects, bodies and architectural environments. In the installation Vessel Orchestra (2019), he amplifies the interior of hollow objects from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In The Resonance Project, begun in 2007, vocal polyphonies play with the natural reverberation of empty buildings, from the Sydney Opera House to the Palais de Tokyo, via a hammam in Istanbul, a car park in Paris and sewers in Brighton. For the multi-screen video installation The Cave, presented at the Lyon 2024 Biennial, the artist invited well-known singers (Rufus Wainwright, Woodkid, Mélissa Laveaux, etc.) to echo their songs in the various rooms of the Font-de-Gaume cave in the Dordogne. This filmed opera reveals the acoustic sounds first experienced by homo sapiens 19,000 years ago. At the same time, he is developing his Resonance Paintings, which use these same vibratory frequencies to spread pigments across his canvases, capturing the "forms of sound".
"Sound is a sculptural presence that depends entirely on form, time, geometry and space," he says. If you look at objects acoustically, they can begin to reveal things that we wouldn't have realised if we had looked at them purely visually."
