Avery Singer: Sailor

The Secession presents the work of the young American painter Avery Singer, whose innovative art effortlessly integrates references to art history and contemporaneity with an exploration of the underpinnings and mechanisms of digital media.

In “Sailor”—the exhibition is the artist’s first solo show in Austria—Avery Singer displays a series of new pictures in large formats. Where her earlier work often scrutinized stereotypes and the rituals of the art world, a recognizable shift toward abstraction predominates in her most recent paintings. The most salient features are projected surfaces, screens within the picture, and shadows that take on a life of their own or sprawl over the bodies and objects like nets. The resulting novel pictorial spaces are characterized by an irritating interplay between the illusionistic depth of the painted volumes, the various planes of which the pictures are composed, and the flatness of the meticulously finished surfaces