At 31, the Painter Avery Singer Is a Bona Fide Art Star. She's Trying Very Hard Not to Let That Get in Her Way

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  At 31, the Painter Avery Singer Is a Bona Fide
  Art Star. She’s Trying Very Hard Not to Let That
  Get in Her Way
  Singer is included in this year's Venice Biennale—the latest in a steady stream of
  major institutional shows for the young artist.
  Taylor Dafoe, May 20, 2019

                     Avery Singer, Self-portrait (summer 2018) (2018). Courtesy of Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler.

  In 2011, Avery Singer was an artist without an art form. She was sitting in an empty studio, hard
  up for money, wondering what to make. Fast forward eight years later, and she is one of the most

                                                                                                         Artnet News, May 2019

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 successful young artists of her generation—a painter, equally popular with collectors and
 curators, who merges an innovative high-tech process with classical painting tropes.

 In an art world desperately asking itself how painting can remain relevant in a hyper-digital age,
many have converged on Singer as the answer. At the same time, she has become the art
market’s latest golden goose. Last November, one of her paintings sold at Sotheby’s for
 $735,000, more than six times its high estimate. In 2018, seven of her works ended up at auction,
 a high number of a young artist who is looking to develop her craft outside the harsh spotlight of
speculation.

Her latest work—large paintings she created by rendering images with sophisticated modeling
software and then airbrushing them onto canvas with a compu ter-controlled printer—are now on
 view in Ralph Rugoff’s Venice Biennale exhibition, her most high-profile outing to date.

 “I love painting technique and thinking about what it means to physically paint,” the artist told
artnet News on a recent spring afternoon ahead of the Biennale. She was sitting at a messy desk
in her studio, a large Brooklyn storefront next to a laundromat. “Those meanings will change over
time as we have differ ent politics and different ways of looking at art, and as media continues to
 expand and explode.”

 A New Direction
 Singer’s commitment to pushing the definition of painting is exactly what piqued Rugoff’s
 interest. “Is it digital art, it is analogue art?” Rugoff asked of Singer’s work. “I was looking for
 things that jam up against the usual cookie-cutter type of thinking.”

 For the Biennale, the curator selected seven recent works from Singer, half of which are rendered
in the gridded, geometric style that has become her signature. They are based on illustrations
originally done in SketchUp, a free 3D modeling software used by architects, designers, and
enginee rs.

 The second batch of works represent a new direction for the artist: Produced with more
 sophisticated modeling software, her new paintings look like windows onto a video game—a
cross between painting, photography, and CGI. In one, Self-portrait (summer 2018), the artist
peers through what looks like a fogged shower door. Her finger is outstretched, as if she is either
about to draw a doodle on the g lass or flip through images on her iPhone.

 “I want to make work that explores something that I haven’t seen in painting before,” Singer said.
 “I guess it’s really a question of being generational—making art that belongs to your generation in
some way.”

Singer’s studio used to be a juice bar, and the back room still has all the trappings of its former
life—large air vents, the warm corpses of cavernous refrigerators long since unplugged. The
 manager sits back there, secluded. Singer prefers to work alone. You can catch brief glimpses
 into her studio from the above-ground train nearby, yellow light filling the window as she works
late into the night.

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                                     Avery Singer. Courtesy of the artist.

 Born to Make Art
 Singer was born in New York in 1987, the daughter of two artists. They lived in a downtown loft,
 half open-plan apartment, half art studio. As a kid, she recalls her mom blasting music and
dancing around while she painted; her dad was more solitary, like Singer is now.

“I’m lucky—I have this example because my parents were artists,” she says. “They lived in a rent-
 controlled loft for $500 a month, worked as film projectionists, got health insurance through it,
 and made art. This was my model for life.”

 Growing up, she experimented with a number of media—photography, film, drawing—but painting
wasn’t one of them. “I grew up with my parents being painters and it seemed like everyone in my
neighborhood downtown was a painter,” she said. While she always felt she would become an
 artist, “I never in my life thought I’d be a painter.”

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                     Avery Singer, Untited (2019). Courtesy of Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler.

 She attended Cooper Union, where she dabbled in video and performance but spent most of her
 time in the wood shop teaching herself carpentry, bronze casting, and welding. After graduation,
she worked at a bar on the Lower East Side and secured a studio share in the Bronx. But she was
fretting more than she was making art. “I was just wo ndering, ‘Okay, what do I want to make now
 that I’m here?’” she said. “I just had leftover materials and no money.”

 She made some pencil drawings on an old pad of paper she’d had since high school, but didn’t
think they were interesting enough, so she decided to spray them with an airbrush. Around the
same time, she was making her first illustrations in SketchUp. Before long, she fused these
elements, rendering the digital illustrations with the airbrush. For the first time, she recalls
 thinking, she might be developing a body of work.

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                  Avery Singer, The Studio Visit (2012). Courtesy of Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler.

 The Studio Visit
 As the child of two artists, it’s perhaps not surprising that Singer was drawn to depicting art-
 world rituals in her work, from life drawing classes to studio visits. (She made her first painting of
a studio visit before she’d ever had a real studio visit to speak of.) Charmed by the work, a friend
showed it t o his dealer, Amadeo Kraupa-Tuskany of the Berlin-based gallery Kraupa-Tuskany
 Zeidler.

 Before long, Singer’s imaginary encounter became a reality—and it went off without a hitch. “She
was so mature and thoughtful and intelligent, and very aware of the conventions of this studio
visit—even though I think it was the first one she’d ever had,” Kraupa-Tuskany told artnet News.
“Avery made all these very brilliant moves. She broke the ice by giving us these press releases to
 read that had nothing to do with her work; she would do them as a writing exercise. I was blown
away by how current her work and process was.”

                                                                                         Artnet News, May 2019