Oliver Beer is a British artist who creates installations, sculptures, movies, and dwell performances that evoke the musicality of objects. In the previous, he’s surveyed the Met’s huge assortment of historic artifacts, attaching microphones to 32 separate works, that collectively, reverberated the hidden acoustics of every vintage’s inside. For his latest present, Beer has taken over Almine Rech‘s Tribeca area to showcase a whole “band” made of varied cat sculptures — from classical works of tigers and cheetahs to kitschy vessels depicting pop cultural figures, corresponding to Tom from Tom & Jerry.
Ceremonially laid within the middle of the gallery, Beer connected a microphone inside every object, which feeds right into a custom-built keyboard and synthesizer. Whenever a secret’s performed, the sound will emanate throughout the sculpture “so that a fin-de-siecle French absinthe pitcher in the form of a cat playing a mandolin sings an F sharp,” wrote the gallery, “and a Japanese Maneki-neko sings a D.” Beer’s “Cat Orchestra” was impressed by the seventeenth century German thinker Athanasius Kircher, who dreamed of an identical sounding “Katzenklavier” (cat organ). “Beer’s real version is far kinder to animals and far more revealing of the sounds we hold within ourselves,” the discharge continued.
Also on view are a collection of cobalt coloured works, dubbed “Resonance Paintings”, which can be made with pigment on canvas, which metaphorically evoke the picture of a sound wave. Resonance Paintings – Cat Orchestra is on view in New York till April 27, 2024.
Almine Rech
361 Broadway,
New York, NY 10013
