"I love how found-Internet photos of lips embody the self-promotion and desire to be admired that we engage in online today."
— Gina Beavers
Born in Athens but now based in New York, Gina Beavers is most celebrated for her visceral paintings that often verge onto the grotesque, subverting clean and beautiful digital images from social media and the Internet into thickly layered compositions that introduce sculptural three-dimensionality. Across a repertoire of subject matter - from "food porn" paintings to step-by-step makeup tutorials — Zipper Lips takes on the latter and appears to be repulsive and alluring at once.
Building the work up through dense accumulations of acrylic paint, Zipper Lips was the final product of a study that the artist had worked on during her Matera Artist Residency in Southern Italy during the summer of 2018. The Matera Artist Residency was founded to provide an inviting space and home for visual artists from around the world to create art while experiencing Italian life and other artists hosted include Austin Lee, Austyn Weiner, Alex Gardner, Oli Epp and Chloe Wise among many others.
Left: Matera Artist Residency
Right: Gina Beavers, zipped lips, 2018, summer session 2018 of the Matera Artist Residency
Zipper Lips depicts five sets of lusciously-coloured midnight-black lips with metal zippers across, wittily alluding to the idea of women being objects of desire. Similarly to the works of New York photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who was at the helm of the underground queer scene in the 60s, as well as Catherine Opie's portfolio that captures the raw tenderness and explicit sexuality of the San Francisco community in the 90s, Beavers conjures up cinematic elements of eroticism and fetishism whilst highlighting the gap between our digital and physical lives at the same time, exploring the performative aspect of make-up and how we consume, desire, and fashion ourselves to reflect contemporary culture.
Gina Beavers has had numerous solo exhibitions at galleries including Marianne Boesky in New York, Carl Kostyal in London and Milan, and Various Small Fires in Seoul among others. In March 2019, she had her first solo museum exhibition Gina Beavers: Teh Life I Deserve at the MoMA PS1. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum in New York, the ICA Miami and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
Provenance
GNYP Gallery, Berlin Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2019