Studio Sessions: Oliver Beer A conversation
By Frankie Dunn
If you listen closely, everything sings. Rooms hum. Objects vibrate. Bodies, too, have frequencies that shift as we breathe and grow. For British artist and composer Oliver Beer, this is more than just a theory; it’s a way of seeing, and hearing, the world. His works—installations, videos, psychedelic paintings, and stirring sonic arrangements—have been drawing on this idea since he began his ‘Resonance Project’ series in 2007, uncovering the innate musicality of spaces and the emotional pull of frequencies we often don’t realise are there.
Beer’s 2025 project, Resonance Paintings: The Cave, exhibited at Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, pushed these musical investigations further than ever before—to the Paleolithic painted Lascaux cave in the Dordogne. There, he entered spaces where early humans not only made marks on the walls but also, it transpires, probably made music too. Having mapped the cave’s natural acoustics, he returned to the sweet spots with musicians including Mélissa Laveaux, Rufus Wainwright, and Woodkid, who sang their earliest musical memories to the walls, letting the resonant frequencies of the space transform their songs into something almost supernatural. The recordings didn’t just result in audio works, but in an evolution of Beer’s ‘Resonance Paintings’, where sound becomes the paintbrush as powdered pigment dances across horizontal canvas, shaped by carefully controlled vibrations from speakers positioned beneath. In this case, the colours used by Beer include the very same pigments as can be found in those prehistoric chambers.
This is also the process behind another recent project, ‘Nymphéas’ (2024), a reimagining of Claude Monet’s ‘Water Lilies’ (1897–1926) commissioned as part of the 150th anniversary of the Impressionist movement. Having recorded underwater soundscapes at Monet’s iconic garden pond in Giverny, Beer brought the audio back to London to commit it to physical form, combining it with the pure tones and harmonies that he wields as his paintbrush: oceans of geometric ripples fixed on huge canvases in the exact dimensions of the series that inspired them. These works provided the perfect opportunity for Beer to broaden his often-monochrome palette to span blues, greens, pinks, and purples—an exciting shift that echoes Monet’s own exploration of colour as he captured the subtle nuances of the pond’s surface.
I join Beer at his meticulously organised studio in an old railway arch in south London, which just so happens to be on the site where William Blake once painted. Inside, jars of pigments are neatly lined up, tidy boxes with labels like ‘broken vessels’, ‘violin components’, ‘sheet music’, and ‘books—cut up’ are stacked on industrial shelving. Paint stains in earthy tones mark the concrete floor while spotlights highlight a selection of his hung works, old and new.