Ceal Floyer

Ceal Floyer (born 1968) is a Pakistani-born British visual artist. She is based in Berlin, Germany.

Biography
Floyer was born in 1968 in Karachi, Pakistan. Floyer received a BFA degree from Goldsmiths College, in 1994. While studying, Floyer worked as a gallery invigilator.

In 1997 she relocated to Berlin to study at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien. The same year she won the Philip Morris Prize. In 2007, she won the National Gallery Prize for Young Art, and in 2009 she won the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize.

In 2008 she exhibited ... 5 minutes later at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art and has exhibited continuously since then. Her work are in the collections of the Tate, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA.

Style
Floyer consistently engages the discourse surrounding conceptual art, minimalism, post-minimalism, the ready-made and technology within her work. Her work is often remarked upon for its visual austerity that stands in stark contrast to the abundant verbal implications and how it precipitates greater conjecture. For example, her work Bucket (1999) is a black bucket accompanied by the sound of a leak. However, if you look closely, there is a CD player inside the bucket, emitting the sound of the leak. Similarly, Matches (2010) is an artwork that places three boxes of matches on a shelf, a pun on whether or not they different boxes of matches "match". In a catalogue essay for her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1999, Berhard Fibicher wrote:

"Both Carousel and Bucket function like classical metaphors -- albeit not on a linguistic level (although the titles are often crucial to deciphering Ceal Floyer's picture puzzles), but at that of sensorial perception. The metaphor operates by conflating the distance between two objects, by revealing their similarity.  Surprising similarities make us seek the characteristics shared by various objects.  Ceal Floyer instrumentalises the distance between objects, or between the object and its name, reducing that distance so much by way of revealing similarity, that one object may become identical with another, or with its name".

Publications

 * Ceal Floyer. Exhibition catalogue. Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK 2002
 * Ceal Floyer. Exhibition catalogue. X-rummet, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, 2002
 * Ceal Floyer. Exhibition catalogue. Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2005
 * Ceal Floyer: Construction. Exhibition catalogue. Kunstmuseen Krefeld, 2007
 * Auto Focus. Exhibition catalogue. Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, 2010
 * Works on Paper. Exhibition catalogue. Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, 2011
 * Ceal Floyer. Exhibition catalogue. Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2013
 * Ceal Floyer. Exhibition catalogue. Museion Bolzano, 2014
 * Ceal Floyer. A Handbook. Exhibition catalogue. Kunstmuseum Bonn and Aargauer Kunsthaus, 2015