Oliver Beer at the Centre Pompidou Group exhibition reassembling the collection Jean Chatelus . (This link opens in a new tab).

Work by British artist Oliver Beer features in the major group exhibition Énormément bizarre at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. On the occasion of the donation by the Fondation Antoine de Galbert of the Jean Chatelus collection to the Centre Pompidou, the museum presents this exceptional group of works assembled, with passion and curiosity, over the course of the collector's life. Bringing together nearly four hundred pieces – sculptures, installations, paintings, photographs, drawings, votive and vernacular objects – reflecting diverse aesthetics and voices, the exhibition focuses on the poetics of ruin, organic decomposition, the forbidden, and the apocalyptic spectre, all of which bear witness to the collector's obsessions. Among the works forming part of the donation is Oliver Beer's Call to Sound Score (2015).

To pay tribute to this extraordinary and unique 20th-century collection, the exhibition sets out to show almost the entire donation through an anachronistic approach that favours free associations. Some areas of Chatelus's home have been reconstructed identically to allow the public to immerse themselves in his world, while others have been restored in a more museum-like fashion, taking into account his vision. Chatelus, a Lyon-born historian and lecturer at the Sorbonne, passed away in 2021 at the age of 82. Over the course of his life, he amassed a unique collection that defied prevailing taste. 

Oliver Beer was born in 1985 and trained in musical composition at the Academy of Contemporary Music in London before attending the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and studying cinematic theory at the Sorbonne, Paris. This musical background is reflected in his live performances, films, installations, paintings and sculptures, which reveal the hidden acoustic properties of vessels, bodies, and architectural environments.