Avery Singer “Reality Ender”

Hauser & Wirth (548 W 22nd St.)

[Image: China Chalet (2021) Acrylic on canvas stretched over wood panel, 100 1/4 x 120 1/4 x 2 1/8 in. © Avery Singer. Photo: Lance Brewer]

This event has ended.

On 9 September, groundbreaking American artist Avery Singer will present two new series of large-scale paintings in her first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth. Occupying both the second and fifth floors of the gallery’s 22nd Street space in New York City, the exhibition invites us to consider form as a state of encounter – an encounter that does not take place with a singular object, reference, or context, but as a conflation of narratives, spaces, histories, and ideas. Singer’s new paintings explore themes – 19th-century European painting motifs, romantic notions of intoxication, stereotypes surrounding the bohemian artist, and icons of contemporary digital culture – that amalgamate past and present, clarity and ambiguity, and propose an escape from our quotidian reality.

Shifting seamlessly between digital and analog processes, Singer’s new work expands her unique visual vocabulary through a nuanced use of industrial automation, three-dimensional computer modeling software, and traditional painting techniques. The artist’s complex process of layering begins with finely primed, gessoed canvas, onto which images are projected before being methodically developed with airbrushed acrylic paint and liquid rubber. The rubber is used as masking solution in a lot of Singer’s paintings, allowing parts of her imagery to be visibly and vigorously removed, effectively unveiling the complex dimensionality that constitutes the numerous layers of each work. Through these diverse methods, Singer continues to challenge the limits of the medium and develop her own way of seeing.