Ceal Floyer @ Lisson Gallery, London

Ceal Floyer
Lisson Gallery, London
Through 5 January 2019

Lisson Gallery presents a new exhibition by Berlin-based artist Ceal Floyer, her sixth with the gallery since she first showed in the same spaces in 1997. Over 20 years on, Ceal Floyer has lost none of her defiant simplicity or piercing philosophical precision, producing a distinct body of sculptural works, featuring poetic situations, subtle interventions, as well as new video and light installations.

A sonic experience beneath a clear, parabolic dome, which contains a directional speaker, hung from the ceiling, briefly drenches visitors with a gushing loop of static sound. While Untitled (Static) could be a strangely meditative zone of white noise, within the already white confines of the gallery, it might also act as an approximation of the sound of rain atop an umbrella, creating a momentary trompe l’oreille (the aural equivalent of a trompe l’œil).

Elsewhere, a diptych montage of small-sized images of Hotel Rooms (all works 2018) culled from travel brochures and glossy magazines advertising hotel suites and interior décor, is hung on two adjacent walls. This travelogue of pristine lodgings bespeaks not so much Ceal predilection for ironic image appropriation as it deconstructs some of the hidden conventions of commercial photography: each vista of a freshly made-up double- or twin-bedded haven is shot from either a left-hand or right-hand point of view. Ceal Floyer proceeds to uncannily mirror and re-stage the angle of the camera in a literal way by categorising and placing each image on either the left- or right-hand side of the space.

An understated survey of what constitutes the boundaries of this exhibition continues on the window where two typical hazard signs depict the maximum headroom available both inside and outside, although the extreme unlikelihood of anyone transgressing the height restrictions render these warnings as merely conceptual in nature. Multiple versions of this work, Maximum Headroom (2014/2018), will be adorning the façade of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein until next year, further expanding (rather than limiting) where in time or space Ceal Floyer’s suggestions can exist or operate.

The function or lack thereof in Ceal Floyer’s subversive statements is compounded both by their ubiquity in everyday life and by their absurdity in her hands. As if to ram this point home, the main gallery features an outsized video, Hammer and Nail, of a hammer violently pounding a nail into a board. The progress of metal into wood seems stunted by the movement of the entire filmic frame, which gradually comes up to meet the nail’s head with each blow, enacting a negation of duties and a structural reversal or complication of the usual hammer-meets-nail relationship. Riven through, as these pieces all are, with Floyer’s inimitable humour and rigour, it is no surprise that she has been included in the South London Gallery’s current group exhibition, ‘KNOCK, KNOCK: Humour in Contemporary Art’ (until 18 November).

LISSON GALLERY, LONDON
67 Lisson Street, London
www.lissongallery.com

Ceal Floyer @ 303 Gallery, New York

Ceal Floyer
303 Gallery, New York
September 16 - October 29, 2011

303 Gallery presents their third exhibition of new work by Ceal Floyer. Floyer’s varied installations employ sound, found objects and sculpture, often subtly manipulating common objects in the exploration of a more ambiguous, contextual reality.

In “Do Not Remove,” a single sign featuring a red diagonal cross bar and the words “Do Not Remove” is affixed to the wall. Surrounding the sign is a grid of small holes of the type that would be left in the wall after the removal of the sign itself. Only one sign remains, orphaned from its implied neighbors, an instruction as well as its own negation. This dry, vaguely maudlin humor is employed again in “Line Busy,” a wall of speakers playing the uninterrupted busy signal tone of a failed telephone call. The black line of speakers is a visual exponent of the pure tone itself, a seeming void from which a signal emanates. Floyer’s dialectical transformations engage the viewer in a sensory game, as the known, expected, and reified jarringly compete in an attempt to parse some sort of tangible certainty.

The exhibition also includes “Page 8680 of 8680,” a stack of 8,680 sheets 8.5 x 11 printer paper stacked as if to resemble a plinth that would normally support a sculpture or vitrine. Each sheet is imprinted with a number, from 1 through 8,680, an identifying marker of the logical atomism into which all objects break down. A wry send-up of minimalism, as well as the institution of art itself, the piece becomes an absurdist paean to materials themselves, as well as a nod to the polemics of simplicity. The deceptively simple “Ladder” treads similar ground - a standard industrial ladder from which all the rungs except the top and bottom have been removed. Turning a functional object into minimalist sculpture is standard practice, but the sly aesthetic reflection on the powers of “high and low” in a social art context bespeak a certain subversion of the understood.

Ceal Floyer was born in 1968. She graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1994 and has exhibited widely throughout the world. Her work has been seen in solo exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, MADRE, Naples, KW Institute for Contemporary Arts, Berlin, MoCA Miami and CCA Tel Aviv, Isreal. In 2007 she was awarded the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art. Her work is in major museum collections including Tate Modern, London, MoMA, New York and Koc Family Foundation, Istanbul. Ceal Floyer lives and works in Berlin. 

303 GALLERY
547 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011
www.303gallery.com

Ceal Floyer: Exhibition at Lisson Gallery, London

Ceal Floyer
Lisson Gallery, London
9 May - 29 June 2002

“I want the manifestation of my ideas to be life-sized, not only regarding their scale, but also in terms of their relevance to their situation or medium. Then they’re more like the ideas behind something. Art is just a manifestation, a Trojan Horse, for ideas.”

- Ceal Floyer

The Lisson Gallery presents Ceal Floyer’s first major solo exhibition in London. She presents a new body of work involving video installation, sound and light projection, works on paper and sculpture.

Ceal Floyer’s clarity of thought and the elegantly concise presentation of her ideas resonate through all areas of her practice. The deceptive simplicity of the work is informed by Ceal Floyer’s particular sense of humour and an almost Beckettian awareness of the absurd; her use of double-takes and shifting points of view forces the viewer to renegotiate his perception of the world.

Ceal Floyer work examines a dialectical tension between the literal and the mundane, and an imaginative construction of meaning. Helix, 2001 consists of a circles template filled with everyday objects selected precisely because they are exactly the same size as the circles. In Warning Birds, 2002 Ceal Floyer uses mass- produced adhesive ‘warning birds’; simple bird shaped silhouettes used to deter birds from plate-glass windows. Rather than using a single sticker she covers the whole window, obscuring the original form and function of both the window and the warning bird. Through its multiplication, this simple almost elegant image is brought to the verge of hysteria.

In the sound piece Goldberg Variation, 2002 the title is used as a framing device, determining the identity and meaning of the work. ‘The Goldberg Variations’ was originally composed by Bach as a Baroque keyboard exercise in musical structure and reasoning. It subsequently became a standard in classical keyboard repertoire, consisting of 30 variations of a single aria. Ceal Floyer takes the initial prototype aria as her starting point, simultaneously presenting all the different piano recordings and interpretations of it that she could find commercially. The condensation of the individual versions into one composite playfully acknowledges and articulates the conceptual themes of the original.

The video work H20 Diptych, 2002 consists of two monitors, one showing a pan of water slowly reaching boiling point whilst on the other a glass of fizzy mineral water gradually goes flat. Both processes are almost imperceptible, as the water inexorably moves towards equilibrium.

For Ceal Floyer, language itself is utilised as a material, intangible yet integral to the work of art. Ink on Paper, 2002, a new version of the series made specifically for this exhibition, acts as both the title of the work and a description of the medium. The circles of colour that are produced by the draining of felt tip pens onto sheets of blotting paper are both visually beautiful and conceptually pure.

Since graduating from Goldsmiths’ College in 1994 Ceal Floyer has exhibited extensively around the world. Previous solo exhibitions include: Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; CCA, Berkeley, California; Institute of Visual Arts, Milwaukee; Kunsthalle Bern; and City Racing, London. Ceal Floyer was awarded the prestigious Philip Morris Scholarship at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin in 1997.

LISSON GALLERY
www.lissongallery.com