Nina Beier: New Works

Woonhuis is pleased to present  New Works, a solo exhibition by Nina Beier. Beier takes off from the distinctive ethos of the artists’ institute, creating an entirely new body of work.  The exhibition is accompanied by a text by Berlin-based writer, critic and curator, Kristian Vistrup Madsen,  offering a fresh perspective on Beier’s evolving artistic practice. 

“In between the street and the artists’ studios of De Ateliers, is a gallery called Woonhuis. The public enter Woonhuis from the street, and from the studio, the residents of De Ateliers. These groups have different aims that only sometimes overlap; different relationships to the artist and the artwork as it is presented in that gallery, cleaved in between these spheres as if between a frame’s back and its glass. If the artist speaks with two faces, one towards the street and another towards the studios, it is, as in the story of Janus, less that one face speaks truth and the other doesn’t, and more that, in the cacophony, truth dissolves altogether. Truth? Reality? Janus is god of beginning and end; god of two-way streets; god of fractured notions. 

The interstitial nature of Woonhuis makes it a portal, as Nina Beier’s works, too, can be experienced as points of contact with a potentially slightly other world—an off-world, the same as ours only from an oblique angle. As in the beginning of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet where the protagonist Jeffrey finds a severed ear in the grass, the camera zooming in on it, almost entering it, as white noise rises to a roaring mass. The ear is a gateway to the off-world of cherry-coloured interiors and twisted, violent forms of desire. It takes us to a place that was there all along.  

Last year, Beier was inaugurated into the category of mid-career artist with a series of survey exhibitions. The mid-career survey is a structuring device; it is a process by which things—artworks, biography, exhibitions—are put into place, each onto its own shelf, the narrative that connects them streamlined, language harnessed. It is now possible to read the first half of the story about the artist Nina Beier and follow the plot from beginning to provisional end. But what this structure also enables, of course, is a post-structure. The messing up of the order. I wonder if that cut between the studios and the street, between what is emerging and what has arrived, is not also a cut through which the work can bleed, once again, out of its own form?”

Excerpt from  “Tick-tock” by  Kristian Vistrup Madsen. 

Nina Beier  (b. 1975 in Denmark) 
Nina Beier’s work has been the subject of survey exhibitions at CAPC in France (2024); Kiasma in Finland (2024); Tamayo Museum in Mexico (2024) and recent large-scale installations have been installed at Mudam in Luxembourg (2024); Art Sonje Center in Seoul (2023); Haus am Waldsee in Berlin (2023); the Lyon Biennale in France (2022); the Busan Biennale in Korea (2022); the Highline in New York (2022); the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2022); Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin (2022); the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil (2021). 

About Woonhuis 
Woonhuis was the former caretaker’s house of De Ateliers and has now been converted into an exhibition space. Three floors and almost 200m2 offers room to international artists to think, work and exhibit. Woonhuis began its exhibition programme in May 2023. 

This exhibition is supported by the Danish Art Foundation. Woonhuis is generously supported by Ammodo Foundation for Arts, Architecture and Science, and Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK).