Avery Singer

Reality Ender

9 September – 30 October 2021

New York, 22nd Street

Groundbreaking American artist, Avery Singer presents two new series of large-scale paintings in her first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth.

Explore the exhibition

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.

Avery Singer & Isabelle Graw in conversation

Read a conversation between Avery Singer and art historian Isabelle Graw about the new works on view in ‘Reality Ender’ and the artist’s evolving practice in a special artist designed booklet accompanying the exhibition. Physical copies will be available at the gallery.

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.

On view in New York, 22nd Street

In accordance with local guidelines and to ensure the health and safety of all our guests and staff, masks are required inside the exhibition, as well as proof of COVID-19 vaccination.

For further information please refer to current local guidelines provided by New York City as well as the CDC website.

About the Artist

Avery Singer

Born in 1987 in New York, Avery Singer has emerged as a powerful contemporary voice whose work explores the possibilities in the convergence of painting and technology. Her highly distinctive oeuvre incorporates both autobiographical and fictional narratives, reflecting upon the art world today and the wider sweep of art history that she has inherited as a painter. Singer’s pioneering techniques are deployed to question the ways in which images and their distribution in our contemporary world, are increasingly informed by new media and technologies.

Singer has developed a highly original visual vocabulary that evokes established traditions of archival documentation and a preferred iconography that references the familiar art historical notions of the artist, the muse and the ironies suggested by these tropes. At the same time, her dexterous process is highly technologically advanced, yielding completed works characterized by atmospheric spaces conjuring the digital realm. Singer’s nuanced use of industrial automation and three-dimensional computer modeling, such as SketchUp, Blender and DAZ 3D, underpins a complex process of layering. She projects imagery onto large-scale canvases and builds the compositions through airbrushed acrylic paint. The resulting paintings contrast clarity with ambiguity, past with future and geometric precision with intuitively generated forms.

Avery Singer’s work gained immediate critical recognition via important solo exhibitions at respected international institutions, including Kunsthalle Zürich (2014), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015), Foundazione Sandretto re Rebaudengo, Turin (2015), the StedelijkMuseum, Amsterdam (2016), Secession, Vienna (2016), the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2017) and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2019). The artist has participated in the 6th Glasgow International Festival of Art, Glasgow, Scotland (2014), the 13th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France (2015), ‘2015 Triennial: Surround Audience,’ New Museum, New York (2015) and further acclaim followed Singer’s selection by Ralph Rugoff for the 58th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2019. The solo exhibition ‘Avery Singer: Unity Bachelor’ opened at ICA Miami in 2023. Most recently, ‘run_it_back.exeˇ’ opened at the Museu de Arte Contemporâneade Serralves, Porto in 2025.

Singer’s work is held in public collections such as Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.

Inquire about available works by Avery Singer

Avery SingerReality Ender

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.

‘Avery Singer. Reality Ender’ is on view now through 30 October 2021 at Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street.

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