11 December 2025
We are saddened to announce the passing of Ceal Floyer. She died on December 11 after a long battle with illness.
Floyer was one of the most radically conceptual artists of her generation, renowned for her concise humor and profoundly understated visual language. Her works are brilliantly inventive and, just like her, full of razor-sharp intelligence, dry wit, and visual acuity. The minimal interventions she defined as her artworks – shifts in scale, subtle spatial displacements, plays on words and nearly invisible edits – provoke a heightened awareness of perception itself.
Like a haiku, Ceal’s art was built from restraint, with every choice being highly intentional and nothing left to chance. Her work is poetic yet uncompromising, and invites viewers to reconsider the mechanics of seeing, naming, and meaning. She achieved, in her practice, a paradoxical condition of feather-light gravitas. Exuding a quiet but forceful presence, her distinct artistic voice was both playful and profound.
As in her “nail-biting performance” at Symphony Hall in Birmingham in 2001, pictured above, everything is contained in a single gesture: success and anxiety, presence and absence, confidence and fragility – distilled into the smallest possible action.
As she used to say when people asked what it was about: “It’s Ceal.”
We will miss her.
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Ceal Floyer was born in 1968 and grew up in England. She studied at Goldsmiths College, London. Since the late 1990s Floyer lived in Berlin.
In 2007 Floyer was awarded the prestigious Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst, Berlin and in 2009 the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize by the Nam June Paik Center, Yongin. Floyer participated in Manifesta 11 in Zurich (2016), dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel (2012), and in the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009).
Floyer’s work has been exhibited extensively. Among the most important solo exhibitions are: Ceal Floyer, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2016); On Occasion, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau (2016); Ceal Floyer, Kunstmuseum Bonn (2015); Ceal Floyer, Museion, Bolzano (2014); Ceal Floyer, Kabinett für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremerhaven (2013); Things, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2011); Works on Paper, CCA, Tel Aviv (2011); Ceal Floyer, DHC/ART, Montreal (2011); Auto Focus, Museum of Modern Art (MOCA), North Miami (2010); Ceal Floyer, KW Institute For Contemporary Art, Berlin (2009), and Gakona, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2009).
Her work can be found in major museum collections, among them Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Sammlung Zeitgenössische Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Berlin; Denver Art Museum, Denver, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Arts Council Collection, London; British Council, London; Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Kunsthalle Bern Collection, Bern; Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel; Musée d’Art Moderne der Paris, Paris; Museo Jumex, Mexico; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Tokyo; Towner Art Gallery, London; and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.
Image: Ceal Floyer, Nail Biting Performance, 2001/2012. As an overt reference to private preparations for a public appearance, Floyer staged the Nail Biting Performance at Symphony Hall, Birmingham in 2001 and again immediately preceding the official press conference of the 2012 dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel. Photo © Hugo Glendinning