Nina Beier

About

A solo exhibition by Nina Beier presents recent and new sculptures including a major spatial commission created for DRAF.

An ambitious new work, Tileables (2014), functions as a base for the exhibition. A 125 m2mosaic of ceramic tiles individually printed with texture patterns originally designed for 3-D modeling software to imitate concrete, marble, mud and other surfaces takes the relationship between the digital and physical namesake to its absurd conclusion. These tiles are accompanied by delivered boxes of fresh vegetables, hacked flatscreen fireplaces, tangled garden hoses and stacks of handmade carpets; plotting a muddy field of the fluid and the petrified, the imitation and the actual.

This exhibition is the culmination of a six-year conversation with Nina, presenting one of the most singular and accurate voices of recent years. We will focus this London presentation on sculptures, and so explore works that are trapped in an ambiguous position between an object and the representation of that object.  Vincent Honoré (Director, DRAF).

Beier’s practice negotiates social and political questions of representation and exchange, inhabiting moments of conflict and correlation. She traces the convoluted relationships between objects and images, as mediation mutates information from things to representations and back again and images subsume or discard their referents to become distinct objects in their own right. Works reveal stark contradictions between what they are and how they are used. Labour and production dynamics echo in DRAF’s building, a former furniture factory built at the end of the 19thcentury.  

With thanks to Johnson Tiles; The Danish Arts Foundation; Laura Bartlett Gallery, London; Croy Nielsen, Berlin; Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City; STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo; Mousse Magazine; Bakhtiyar and Frontier Craft Lager.

Nina Beier (b. 1975, Aarhus, Denmark; lives in London) graduated from the Royal College of Art, London (2004). She has recently exhibited her work in solo exhibitions at Mostyn, Llandudno (2014); Nottingham Contemporary (2014); Glasgow Sculpture Studios (2013); as well as in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2014); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2013); Museion Bozen, Bolzano (2012); The Artist’s Institute, New York (2012); KW Institute For Contemporary Art, Berlin (2012); and Tate Modern, London (2012).