Avery Singer

Happening

Viewing location: New York

2022
Acrylic on canvas stretched over aluminium panel
153 x 127.6 x 5.4 cm / 60 1/4 x 50 1/4 x 2 1/8 in

Shifting seamlessly between digital and analogue processes, ‘Happening’ (2022) expands on Avery Singer’s dynamic visual rhetoric that employs the binary language of computer programmes and industrial materials while engaging with the tradition of painting and the legacy of Modernism.

Singer’s complex layering process begins with a finely primed gessoed canvas, which in this instance is stretched over aluminium. Images, geometrically rendered in the 3D modelling programme SketchUp, are then projected onto the canvas, and developed with airbrushed acrylic paint, which eliminates traces of the artist’s hand. This intensive and complex process lends an intricate and layered dimensionality to Singer’s work, allowing the artist to conceive a commanding and otherworldly scene, a kind of trompe l’oeil.

Executed in Singer’s signature grisaille style, ‘Happening’ (2022) is a testament to the evolution of the artist’s practice. Here, Singer depicts three figures that are reduced to a series of lines, grids, and rudimentary forms, formally recalling part of her eponymous painting from 2014. These humanoids bare sombre yet absorbed expressions, which sit in stark contrast to their robust and rigid stature. She overlays this cast of characters with dramatic shadows that extend beyond the picture plane, enhancing the powerful and enigmatic nature of the composition. By eliminating color, Singer emphasizes the three-dimensional effects of light and shadow, which instils a greater sense of weight, depth and physicality to the work. Building on this, Singer achieves a stronger level of contrast and opacity compared to her earlier monochromatic paintings, marking a development in her already transcendent oeuvre.

Singer’s practice is rooted in contemporary culture as well as historical reference. Here, as suggested by the title, Singer alludes to the theatrical ‘Happenings’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s, pioneered by artists such as Allan Kaprow. By doing so, Singer explores the trope of the artist, displaying projected visions about artists’ lives and their work—a theme that she readily explores. Taken as a whole, Singer’s paintings amalgamate the past and present, exploring the liminal space between clarity and ambiguity, providing an escape from our quotidian reality. As curator Kathy Noble states, Singer is ‘totally pushing the limits of what painting can do today … she’s looking at a fractured culture and what that means for the individual, and for all of us.’ [1]

About the artist

Avery Singer (b. 1987) was born and raised in New York. Her parents, the artists Janet Kusmierski and Greg Singer, named her after Milton Avery. Growing up in a creative community, Singer experimented with photography, film, and drawing, but in those years never considered working with paint. In 2008, Singer studied at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, and in 2010, she received her B.F.A. from Cooper Union, New York. During her studies, Singer engaged in performance art, video making, as well as sculpture utilizing carpentry, metal casting, and welding. After graduation, she discovered her chosen art form from an unanticipated experiment with SketchUp, a program used by her peers to design exhibition spaces, and airbrushed a black-and-white painting based on a digital illustration. Since then, Singer has employed the binary language of computer programs and industrial materials in order to remove the trace of the artist’s hand while engaging the tradition of painting and the legacy of Modernism.

Learn more

[1] Kathy Noble quoted in Siddhartha Mitter, ‘Avery Singer Pushes the Limits of Painting,’ W Magazine, September 7, 2021, https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/avery-singer-artist-interview (accessed 25 April 2022)