Artist

Sue de Beer

Sue de Beer is a contemporary artist who lives and works in New York City. As an artist, de Beer uses multiple media including photography, video, installation, and sculpture, to explore the relationships between time and memory.

De Beer was raised in New England, and lives in New York City. She cites the aesthetic of 1700 and 1900 New England as an early influence on her work: Growing up in a rambling Victorian house with a widow's walk in Salem, Mass., which still exudes an air of its witchy past, she felt that mysticism was a kind of birthright, and it has been a more prominent element of her work in recent years.. Ms. de Beer has also borrowed from the dark, violent post-religious mysticism of the novelist Dennis Cooper. (From his novel "Period," used in a 2005 de Beer video: "I could open the other dimension right now if I wanted. Or I could stay here with you. I'm kind of like a god.") --Randy Kennedy

Time itself is the most often repeated subject of de Beer's work, emerging from images and ideas related to the passage of time. Ghosts, haunting, adolescence, trace memory and erasure find a common ground within this theme.

Ms. de Beer said that her fascination with ghosts is in one sense simply about finding a way to explore how we all must deal with the past and with loss as we grow older, a struggle that finds a metaphor in the artistic process itself.--Randy Kennedy

De Beer lived in Berlin, Germany between 2002-2008. She produced and shot three films in Berlin: 'Hans & Grete' (2003), 'Black Sun' (2005), and 'the Quickening' (2006).

Her work has been the subject of several major solo exhibitions including "Hans & Grete", at the Kunst Werke, Berlin, "Black Sun", at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, "Permanent Revolution" at the MuHKA Museum in Antwerp, Belgium, and "the Ghosts" at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. She has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad at venues including but not limited to the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, the Brooklyn Museum, the Park Avenue Armory, and Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in Los Angeles, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Kunst-Werke, the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in Germany, the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz, Austria, the MuHKA Museum in Antwerp, Belgium, and the Museum of Modern Art, Busan, in Busan, South Korea.

Videography

Heidi 2 (The Unauthorized Sequel)

2000, 30:00 minutes, colour, English

Critical Writing

Sue de Beer: Marianne Boesky Gallery
by David Velasco. Artforum, Feb. 2007, v. 45, no. 6.
True Story
by Sue De Beer. FELIX: A Journal of Media Arts and Communication, 1999, v. 2, no. 2.