Artforum previews Ceal Floyer's survey exhibition at Aspen Art Museum in Colorado
12 October 2016
Two decades ago, while her YBA predecessors were garnering international attention for blaring, acerbic one-liners, Ceal Floyer emerged in Britain as a beacon of restraint, creating such quotidian epigrams as 'Light', 1994, a dangling, unplugged bulb lit by four surrounding slide projectors. Floyer’s minimal gestures require sustained consideration, making her practice perfectly suited for a showing such as this – a spare but rewarding survey of thirteen pieces made between 1993 and 2015. Take in the early work 'Door', 1995, in which a slide projector has been configured to mysteriously illuminate a strip of light beneath a closed door, or 'Solo', 2006, a mic stand supporting a would-be star’s hairbrush. Or pause to digest the artist’s latest iteration of 'Bars', 2015, for which she has fitted the museum’s street-level picture window with bespoke black steel bars. Floyer’s closed-circuit construction outs itself, plangently, as a brittle, carefully maintained surface, half covering and half concealing. Existential anxiety? We don’t talk about that.
Floyer’s Aspen Art Museum exhibition, which marks the artist’s second major solo museum show in the United States, will run from 14 October 2016 until 22 January 2017. For more information, please visit www.aspenartmuseum.org/exhibitions/112-ceal-floyer
