Pressing Matters
Nina Beier Investigates Form, Labor, and Power
Nina Beier, ‘Real Estate’, through 4 January 2026, Bozar, Brussels, bozar.be
The first time I saw a major exhibition by Nina Beier was exactly ten years ago, when I was still a sculptor in training and she had just opened ‘Cash for Gold’, a major solo exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg. What stood out back then still holds strong now: she’s a master at choosing and combining two opposing materials into one compact unit through a single, classic, basic sculptural move – most prominently pressing, but also stacking, breaking, or filling or what I call: ‘Sculpture 1.0’.
Beier has been a household name in the contemporary art world since her early rise during the Post-Internet moment of the 2000s and 2010s. And yes, while her work shares some affinities with that scene – particularly in terms of material choices and themes like circulation, consumption, and commodification – let’s be clear: her practice isn’t rooted in digital aesthetics or online culture, but in a deep engagement with found materials and their objecthood.
Nina Beier’s newest exhibition takes place in the antechambers of Bozar which is comprised of four rooms that radiate out from a central rotunda – an architectural layout recently used to host compact, mid-scale solo shows by both emerging and established artists. Nina Beier titled her exhibition ‘Real Estate’, borrowing the name from one of her works – fittingly so, since the sculptures latch onto and infiltrate the symbolic ‘entrée’ to one of Brussels’ most prestigious properties and art institutions with precision.
Historically, antechambers served as waiting rooms in both modern and classical architecture, a last step before a more significant part of the house, a metaphorical antechamber of power. Beier plays with this idea, not only architecturally but conceptually, as the term real estate also nods to the collection of objects she presents here: an artist’s ‘estate’, if you will – a lived-in body of work. These objects, sourced from lives already lived are not quite done speaking, they all seem to echo the ‘real’ world.
The exhibition unfolds from its center in the rotunda, where two mechanical bulls carry baby formula in plastic containers on their backs. Their name, Beast (2018-2024), refers to the human domestication of once-wild, beastly animals that are now trying to shake off their dominant rider. The burdened bulls move erratically, trying to rid themselves of their unwanted load, to reject the control imposed on them, which, in the logic of the exhibition makes getting lost in the surrounding works tricky, as one fears to be struck by a bull’s back at any moment. It’s a wake-up call every time you cross the rotunda to enter another room. A wink and a nudge in the back, reminding you to be careful not to get too absorbed in the beauty of their surfaces and surroundings – a disturbing presence amid the polished, silent surfaces of the other works.
Great Depression (2023), a bathtub clogged with a thick roll of banknotes, sits in the first room to the right of the rotunda and is made from the same conceptual (designed to fit a human body) and material cloth (fiberglass) as the bucking bulls. Embedded upright in the wall, it penetrates the institution on a cellular level—the plughole serving as a money slot for bribery potentially buying access, an exchange of services or fast-tracking your career. Gravity makes filling it impossible; water would just flow out continuously. This is a motif that already originates in earlier works. In Blood, Sweat and Tears (2013), where Adidas basketball shoes ‘leak’ artificial sweat and tears. The Baby series (2018) shows a large waterbed mattresses half-filled and suspended, evoking the moment just before birth when the mother’s water breaks. And in the more recent Women and Children (2022), found bronze sculptures spout water from their eyes, creating improvised fountains.
Like many of Beier’s previous sanitary works, Great Depression is installed so it could never actually be used – even if hooked up to plumbing, they are always literally and figuratively clogged. Turned sideways, mounted too high or too narrow, these fixtures are deliberately stripped of functionality – like homemakers without homes. What remains are their ergonomic contours and the extreme prettiness of their soft, pale colours.
But pastels themselves are never neutral. Once used for delicate eighteenth-century portraiture, they came to symbolise aristocratic refinement, femininity, and softness. In postwar America, they took on new meaning – coating cars, appliances, and bathrooms in suburban homes – with promises of modernity and optimism. The Colani bathtub on display signals a shift from traditional ceramic ware toward a more speculative future (or retro-futurist past): an ergonomic utopia merging human needs (like artificial breast milk – sic!) with sleek, visionary design. A vision that could have included an unburdening of women’s care work which unfortunately never came to fruition.
No material or idea ever really leaves Beier’s world – they vanish, hibernate, and then return, wearing new skins and speaking new tongues. There’s always a connection to the body, and to the sculptural vessels that that either support or stand in opposition to it. Wigs made of human hair once pressed onto hand‑woven Wagireh carpets beneath a heavy glass plate in Minutes (2013‑2015) at the Hamburger Kunstverein now make a more refined and less flashy comeback as Parts (2023): human-hair beards glued directly onto the gallery wall, one metre above the ground. Typically worn by actors, children, or drag kings to perform masculinity, here they appear not on bodies, but on the institution’s white walls.
The flattening and two dimensionality once achieved by glass is now performed by the surface behind – by the wall itself. If we think of the work in terms of theatre, the human-hair beards help create a form of realism that is broken by comic relief: adorning one of the space’s five walls (a pentagon – sic!) with beards at a height suggestive of kneeling men. As the wall text notes, this could read as either ‘diminutive or erotic’. Interestingly, the German word antichambrieren – referring to the antechamber and the deferential behaviour enacted within it – evokes this social scenario precisely: a ritual of bowing and scraping before the powerful, a physical manifestation of submission.
But the work also gestures elsewhere. If the beard guards the mouth, could these lower-hanging beards suggest pubic hair wigs – linking the two ‘mouths’? Ancient Greek and Roman medical theory claimed women possess an upper and lower mouth, one for speech and one for sexuality. In this light, the installation echoes deeper cultural mythologies. Curiously, merkins – pubic wigs made from human hair – just resurfaced in fashion: first in John Galliano’s Maison Margiela Artisanal collection (January 2024), and again just days ago, reimagined by Kim Kardashian as a faux-pubic-hair thong that reads more like conceptual art than lingerie. Like a swift back-and-forth in a game of ping pong, Beier’s work reflects the world outside the gallery, sometimes foretelling the past on future runways.
The works Real Estate (2013) and Sculpture (2025), situated across the rotunda, are both partially made of marble and integrate seamlessly into the marble-clad walls of the antechambers. In this space, a kind of quiet struggle unfolds – or perhaps a parallelism – in which architecture and artwork negotiate for dominance.
In Real Estate, marble plinths support car and chair headrests; in Sculpture, marble books weigh down kitchen rolls – domestic remnants that recall both the everyday labor of the household and a material often used in schools to make early sculptural attempts. In one, marble presses down, subdues; in the other, it props up, elevates: support versus suppression.
The headrests – designed to support human heads for comfort or protection – resurface in the later work as headstones. They act as metaphorical pillows, yet also carry the weight of a world that prizes and compensates intellectual labor, while devaluing the material, the menial, and the manual. It’s a convergence of two ends of a spectrum: on one side, that which is culturally assigned worth—hardness, science, patriarchy; on the other, that which is not—softness, domestic labor, short-lived materials, and crafting.
While writing this review, I’m re-reading Deborah Levy’s autobiographical book Real Estate, trying to establish connections – where there may be some, or perhaps none. I am searching for the line: ‘If real estate is a self-portrait and a class portrait, it is also a body arranging its limbs to seduce.’, which seems to ring strikingly true for Beier’s work. The exhibition, and the objects within it, speak to power, control, and (hu)man domination. Sleek and seductive, these surfaces double as portraits and social reflections - society seeps through them.
What I initially described as ‘Sculpture 1.0’, the simple combination of two opposing materials, might seem like a reductive formula – a one-trick pony – but there’s a beauty, and perhaps a courage, in its simplicity. A clarity that I fear might get lost if the compositions become too complex. The elegance of the gesture lies not in layering meaning and material, but in reducing it to the point where a single sculptural move can carry the weight of the history, labor, and metaphorical potential of its materials.
