"I'm interested in the ways in which artists have removed the hand from painting using technology...Something where there is no start and no understanding of where the artist’s hand was."
—Avery Singer
Executed in 2011, Ise Gropius is a definitive example of Avery Singer’s early monochromatic portraits that garnered the young artist critical acclaim. With this work, Singer offers a tongue-in-cheek homage to “Mrs. Bauhaus”–the titular writer, editor and artist married to Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius–here depicted in a stylized bust. Singer characteristically dramatizes her subject in a bricolage of styles, rendering a collage-like grisaille. Singer nods to art historical movements contemporary to her subject like Constructivism, Futurism and Cubism through exaggerated, schematic and discretely fashioned facial features all the while casting the figure in a 21st century lens. By rendering her initial sketches in 3-D modeling programs like SketchUp, Singer retains distinctly digital handprints, such as amplified gradients, in her meticulously executed paintings.
"Singer’s paintings testify to her great fascination with the visual rhetoric of the historical avant-gardes by reactivating the formal aesthetics of Constructivism, Futurism, and Vorticism and the somber palette of grisaille."
—Isabelle GrawIse Gropius anticipates many of the themes that Singer would shortly thereafter pursue in the distinct body of work produced for her first solo exhibition The Artists at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, in 2013. Exploring the stereotypes of how artists live, work, and socialize, these works similarly featured staged figures–their human forms skewed through geometric stylization. As put forth in the exhibition’s press release, “Contemporary media, meshing with bygone trends of the historical avant-garde, produces a perspective of aesthetics that falters to find a foothold on the accepted timeline of art history.”i
Throughout her oeuvre, Singer has engaged with the modernist credo of distinguishing art from nature. Adapting this with a contemporary lens, she utilizes technology as her mode of intervention into the traditional medium of painting. Having developed a unique technical process to produce her underdrawings, Avery then paints the image onto the canvas with an airbrush. On her unequaled painting process, Avery reflects, “In painting, we have become used to seeing process, to seeing how paintings are made...being able to tie your own subjective experience of perceiving the first to the last stroke of the brush.”ii Singer’s works, on the other hand, remove this connection to remain enigmatic, seemingly historical and contemporary, deeply reverent of their art historical antecedents and trailblazing in their seamless meld of digital and physical media.
