Nina Beier

About

Beier’s latest works at Metro Pictures elaborate on her interest in the relationship between objects and their representation. Persistently tracking the status of images in our world, Beier exploits the vast resource of image banks to develop a transmutable lexicon all her own. She extracts objects from their circumscribed settings and exposes their layers of historical, cultural and social information.

In Plunge, a series of sculptures, Beier selects photographs found on image banks and reproduces them using actual objects. Cast in clear resin inside oversized wine glasses and hollow glass mannequin heads, the individual objects are suspended in a paradoxical state in which they simultaneously remain independent things, comprise an image and become parts of a sculpture.

In another series, Beier presses Hermès silk neckties, with their distinctive allover patterns, inside large frames with down jackets, sleeping bags, feathers and human hair wigs. Approximations of two-dimensional compositions, the neckties coil around sleeping bags, constricting the suggested figures inside them into a semblance of an embryonic form, or animate the jackets, wigs and feathers as if caught in a sudden windstorm.

“Beier’s recent inquiries are centered on ubiquitous representations of things that appear on and within other things, questioning the ways objects at once are exhausted by human signification yet are not fully determined by language and apprehension.” – in progress essay by the Post Brothers. 

Nina Beier’s exhibition “Cash for Gold” opens at Kunstverein Hamburg on May 22 (catalogue published by Mousse with text by John Miller). Her exhibition at Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius, Lithuania opens June 20 and she will contribute a work to this summer's exhibition of public art on Governor’s Island, which opens late June. Beier is the 2014 recipient of Germany’s prestigious Kunstpreis der Boetcherstrasse. 

Beier has had one-person exhibitions at Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland; Nottingham Contemporary, UK; Mostyn, Llandudno, UK; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Her work has been included in group shows at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; The Artists Institute, New York; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Swiss Institute, New York; and the Power Station, Shanghai.