One of the most celebrated contemporary artists working today, Avery Singer has received both critical and popular attention for her signature painting style, creating images that are both digital and analog with the help of the 3D-modeling software, Google SketchUp, and acrylic paint applied with an air brush.
Though the artist’s conceptual considerations are deeply rooted in art history, Singer said in 2019, “I want to make work that explores something that I haven’t seen in painting. I guess it’s really a question of being generational—making art that belongs to your generation in some way.”1
Untitled (AS/M 16-36/U), 2016, illustrates the artist’s desire to forge an experimental style while paying homage to the history of modernism. With a structure reminiscent of Piet Mondrian’s signature grid, Singer’s composition simultaneously evokes vintage computer aesthetics. The incorporation of gestural strokes reveals a further nod to the history of painting, achieving a complex and layered pictorial language at the intersection of tradition and technology.
By employing virtual fictional characters and symbols pulled from art history or the current world, Singer’s experiments in reimagining the future of painting turn the expected on its head. Often reimagining the subject of painting as the act of image-making as itself, Singer eschews romanticized views around the medium of painting and, in doing so, has developed her own way of seeing.
