Avery Singer

For Zurich Art Weekend 2026, US artist Avery Singer presents new paintings and a site-specific architectural intervention transforming the upstairs Zurich gallery into a space reminiscent of a casino—a charged environment shaped by surveillance.

I started watching professional poker tournaments and learned about a poker player named Cate Hall. I paid attention to the techniques she used. She would study the pulse rate on the opponent’s neck to understand their emotional response to their hand. I don’t know if that’s a common technique, but it felt like being an artist. There are all these secret little things that we’re paying attention to on this global stage. I got really interested in thinking of the players as a kind of metaphor for artists. Poker is a solitary sport; you play for yourself alone. The players are exposed and scrutinized and surveilled. They are mediating risk and risk-taking behavior, which is what I think artists do, too. That’s the fun and also the freedom of being an artist.–Avery Singer

I worked with AI to generate visual material that I could incorporate into the paintings. These paintings layer AI imagery on top of hand-painted, digitally inspired material. In between each layer of paint is liquid rubber that I’ve applied very sloppily by hand, to signal that this is a painting—not a printout or a digitally produced object. I paint representationally, so I was searching for a subject that was a good metaphor, a metaphor I could identify with, and I found one in the poker players. I thought the paintings might give off an “uncanny valley” feeling—that eerie emotion generated when something looks almost human. I think that’s what I was going for with it. I thought it would be interesting if the viewers could look at the paintings and recognize an AI system that was malfunctioning. Maybe there’s poetry to be found in the breakdown of this highly developed technology.–Avery Singer