Artist Oliver Beer: “Learning to Listen Changes How You See."

Why It Matters

Beer's approach challenges the dominance of visual culture and suggests new ways museums, architects and artists can activate objects and spaces to foster empathy and deeper engagement. Re-centering listening has implications for how cultural institutions present collections and for broader conversations about perception, memory and social understanding.

Summary

Artist Oliver Beer argues that learning to listen can reshape perception, using sound to reveal new dimensions in familiar objects, spaces and social relations. Drawing on his musical upbringing after discovering a Steinway in his childhood barn, Beer treats memory and resonance as his primary materials, creating works that make buildings sing and expose the latent tones in ancient ceramics. He describes sound as having sculptural presence—each physical form carries a note—and explores resonance through installations, voice experiments and intimate performance pieces that shift how viewers understand objects. His practice seeks to destabilize visual primacy and prompt rediscovery by privileging deep acoustic experience over thin, screen-driven consumption.

Original Description

”Learning to listen changes how you see.” Artist Oliver Beer explores the emotional and physical resonance within objects, spaces and people – using sound to reveal histories, memories and connections.

It was the discovery of a hidden Steinway piano in his childhood home’s barn that introduced Oliver Beer to music and sound. “I have a very musical understanding of the world, and I’ve always had this kind of sensitivity to sound,” he explains. “You start to really listen deeply to things, to the world, to each other, there's this sense of rediscovery. And that’s what’s exciting.” Throughout his career, Oliver Beer has been interested in how deep listening can dissolve preconceptions and create empathy, turning art into a shared human experience. “The resonance is what this is all about,” he says: “I work with resonance in buildings, with vessels, with the voice, I’ll find the resonance of the body itself, like singers sing through each other’s mouths.”

In recent years, he’s explored the sounds and thus the music of the cave Font-de-Gaume in France. By inviting singers such as Rufus Wainwright and Mélissa Laveaux to sing their childhood songs in the cave, Beer transformed the caves into a living choir. The work maps out resonance against the ancient paintings to explore how humanity’s earliest art may already have been deeply musical. “This is a shared space that we really, really inherit together as human beings. And. When I took singers into this space, they are connecting to the place. They are connecting to the art and they're connecting to the earth.”

“I only started making paintings from sound about five years ago.” Oliver Beer began making paintings from sound by placing pigment on canvases vibrated by sound waves, allowing the sound itself to create the image. The process turned resonance into a visual language, capturing sound as both a physical force and an emotional, immersive experience: “Painting like this is totally magical,” he says and continues: “When I paint now, it’s this fluid flowing non-verbal experience I get. I get totally lost.”

Oliver Beer (b. 1985, UK) is a visual artist and composer whose sculptures, paintings, installations, videos and immersive live performances reveal the hidden properties and innate musicality of objects, bodies and architectural spaces. Beer’s work has been exhibited in major institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and MoMA PS1 in New York; London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE; the Centre Pompidou, Opéra Garnier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Palais de Tokyo, Musée d’Art Moderne, and Château de Versailles in Paris; the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon; Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Australia; Ikon Gallery in Birmingham; WIELS in Brussels; the West Bund Museum and The Long Museum in Shanghai; as well as the Sydney, Istanbul, Lyon, and Venice biennales. Beer was part of the British Art Show 9 and has undertaken residencies at Villa Albertine, Palais de Tokyo, Watermill Centre, Sydney Opera House, and Foundation Hermès. Oliver Beer studied musical composition at the Academy of Contemporary Music in London, Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and film theory at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Oliver Beer was interviewed by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen in his London studio in April 2026.

Camera: Rasmus Quistgaard

Edited and produced by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026

Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond.

Subscribe to our channel for more videos on art: https://www.youtube.com/thelouisianachannel

FOLLOW US HERE:

Website: http://channel.louisiana.dk

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/louisianachannel

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LouisianaChannel