Ceal Floyer


Ceal Floyer is a British visual artist, based in Berlin.

Biography

Floyer was born in 1968 in Pakistan. Floyer received a BFA from Goldsmith's College, London, in 1994. While studying, Floyer worked as a gallery invigilator. In 1997 she located to Berlin to study at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien. The same year she won the Philip Morris Prize. In 2007 she won the National Gallery Prize for Young Art, and in 2009 she won the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize.
In 2008 she exhibited ... 5 minutes later at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art and has exhibited continuously since then. Her work are in the collections of the Tate, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA.
Floyer lives in Berlin.

Style

Floyer consistently engages the discourse surrounding conceptual art, minimalism, post-minimalism, the ready-made and technology within her work. Her work is often remarked upon for its visual austerity that stands in stark contrast to the abundant verbal implications and how it precipitates greater conjecture. For example, her work Bucket is a black bucket accompanied by the sound of a leak. However, if you look closely, there is a CD player inside the bucket, emitting the sound of the leak. Similarly, Matches is an artwork that places three boxes of matches on a shelf, a pun on whether or not they different boxes of matches "match". In a catalogue essay for her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1999, Berhard Fibicher wrote:
"Both Carousel and Bucket function like classical metaphors -- albeit not on a linguistic level, but at that of sensorial perception. The metaphor operates by conflating the distance between two objects, by revealing their similarity. Surprising similarities make us seek the characteristics shared by various objects. Ceal Floyer instrumentalises the distance between objects, or between the object and its name, reducing that distance so much by way of revealing similarity, that one object may become identical with another, or with its name".

Publications