Avery Singer

Biography

Avery Singer is an American painter born in 1987 in New York City, the daughter of two artists, who grew up immersed in a working studio environment before developing one of the most distinctive digitally assisted painting practices in contemporary art. Rather than painting directly from observation or imagination in the traditional sense, Singer builds her compositions first in 3D modeling software, including Google SketchUp and DAZ 3D, constructing digital scenes and figures on screen before projecting the resulting imagery onto large canvases. She then translates these projected forms into finished paintings using an airbrush loaded with acrylic paint, a technique that produces surfaces with a flattened, greyscale, almost machine-rendered quality that nonetheless remains a handmade object built through careful physical labor. Singer's subject matter frequently draws on the history of art and avant-garde movements, referencing Cubism, Futurism, Bauhaus design, and Dutch Golden Age painting, often populating her scenes with schematic, mannequin-like figures engaged in the rituals of art-making, studio life, and cultural production. This layering of historical reference with contemporary digital process allows her work to comment on how images circulate, get rendered, and get remade across different technologies and eras. Singer's work is represented internationally by Hauser and Wirth and has been exhibited widely, including at the Venice Biennale, where her paintings were shown in dialogue with the exhibition's broader themes around technology and representation. She has been recognized as one of the most in-demand painters of her generation, with her market and critical reception growing rapidly since her early exhibitions in New York project spaces. Across her body of work, Avery Singer continues to interrogate the boundary between digital construction and painted surface, using outdated-feeling 3D software as an unlikely tool for engaging painting's oldest and most persistent questions about image-making itself.