Lisson is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Ceal Floyer (1968 – 2025) with the gallery in China. Coinciding with her presentation Unfinished at Berggruen Arts & Culture, Palazzo Diedo, Venice, the exhibition features a rigorously concise grouping of sculptural works and readymades showcasing Floyer’s conceptual precision and dry wit.
Floyer’s practice interrogates familiar objects through a subtle defamiliarisation, exposing the disjunction between linguistic and visual registers. Characterised by a deceptive simplicity, her propositions employ double-takes and shifting perspectives to compel perceptual renegotiation. The resulting oeuvre achieves a distinctive tone of quiet resonance, wherein minimal gestures result in a reconsideration of the quotidian that is at once playful and profound.
Upon entering, visitors encounter the floor-based work Meeting Point (2013), which comprises a circular arrangement of red arrows mimicking universal signage seen in public spaces. Whilst the work delivers a directive, the configuration leads nowhere, with the language of orientation providing no actual destination. This intervention renders a familiar navigational tool functionally absurd, generating cognitive dislocation.
Read moreOn a nearby wall, Floyer's everyday poetics continues in Will Return (2018), a work that comprises a readymade commercial clock sign stripped of its hands. This alteration negates the object’s intended function, bringing the viewer into an existential mediation on presence and absence. Elsewhere in the gallery, Day for Night (2001) positions two desk lamps on a shelf; projecting overlapping beams of cold blue and warm orange light, each lamp cancels out the other in a deadpan visual loop.
Along the length of the gallery, Domino Effect (2015) presents a continuous row of upright dominoes, each piece placed flush against the next. By closing the gaps that would normally allow a chain reaction to unfold, Floyer arrests a symbol of cause and effect into a static, self-contained sculpture – a small act of sabotage that results in a study of suspended potential. On the opposite wall, Hinges (2021) consists of two metal door hinges installed directly into a 90-degree corner of the gallery. As with the dominoes, the hinges are stripped of function through their subtle misappropriation, redirecting attention to the architecture and charging it with an unresolved tension.
Suspended from the ceiling, Untitled (Static) (2018) takes the form of a parabolic dome fitted with a speaker that plays recorded static, the texture of the sound resembling falling rain. The associative qualities of the white noise transform the installation, composed from the most economical of means, into a sonic and visual illusion replete with both humour and pathos.
Collectively, these works distill Floyer's singular ability to transform the overlooked and the ordinary into profound perceptual enquiries. Through restrained gestures that suspend function, the work situates the viewer within a state of productive ambiguity, where the familiar is bestowed with a contemplative weight through being made strange.
