Ceal Floyer


Cecile Anne "Ceal" Floyer was a British conceptual and visual artist. She was based in Berlin, Germany.

Life and career

Cecile Floyer was born in Karachi, then in West Pakistan, Pakistan, on 18 April 1968 and grew up in England. Floyer received a BFA degree from Goldsmiths College, in 1994. While studying, Floyer worked as a gallery invigilator, i.e. attendant.
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 exhibited continuously thereafter. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA, among other art institutions.
Ceal Floyer died in Berlin on the morning of 11 December 2025, at the age of 57, after a long illness.

Style

Floyer consistently engaged 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 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 is an artwork that places three boxes of matches on a shelf, a pun on whether or not the 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, 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. Floyer instrumentalised 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