Working at the intersection of installation, sculpture, film, and photography, Sue de Beer (b. 1973; Tarrytown, NY) creates immersive, chromatic worlds of concealed histories, buried secrets, and dramatic, romantic beauty. Often screened in site-specific environments of the artist's own design, de Beer's insistently narrative films are rife with allusions to literary and film histories, intimate character portraits, and meticulously crafted prose narrated by her hand-selected performers. Employing experimental optical and sensory effects throughout her work, she subtly transports viewers into vast, absorbing landscapes. Drawing on deep literary roots in her film, photography, and sculpture, the artist fuses themes and motifs borrowed from seemingly disparate genres—science fiction, gothic horror, Italian Giallo thriller, among others—into a singular visual, narrative, and cinematic language.
De Beer's films and photography are defined, in part, by her unique editing style. Throughout her filmic oeuvre, she employs persistence of vision, duplication, and reflection, which infuse her two-channel productions with the ever-present sense of the physicality of the film itself. Creating immersive environments in the galleries where her films are screened, she brings the colors and textures of the film into the audience's space, drawing on the multiplicity of literary, cinematic, and historic references in her non-linear narratives and enhancing the sense of the supernatural that pervades her work.
De Beer's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Kunst-Werke, Berlin, German; the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York, NY; the M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, CA; nd the Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the New Museum, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; the Kunst-Werke, Berlin, Germany; the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany; Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany; the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany; the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Austria; the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; and the Museum of Modern Art, Busan, South Korea. De Beer's two-channel video installation, Hans & Grete was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. She has also completed numerous commissions of public art works at locations around the world, including: 1331 Yonge Street, Toronto, Canada; the High Line, New York, NY; and Public Art Fund, Times Square, New York, NY. De Beer's work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; and the Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2016 and received a prestigious Pollock Krasner Foundation Artist's Grant in 2019. De Beer received her B.F.A. from Parsons School of Design in 1995, and her M.F.A. from Columbia University in 1998; she lives and works in New York, NY.