GINA BEAVERS
ARTIST GINA BEAVERS’ ANTICIPATED SOLO-EXHIBITION AT MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY
In her perplexing, attention-grabbing and often gluttonous paintings, American artist Gina Beavers (b. 1978 Athens, Greece) transforms images from social media into works that break away from the surface. Beavers achieves this dimensionality by using foam and acrylic paint that are thickly layered upon each other, producing a three-dimensional work. Following her museum exhibition The Life I Deserve at Moma PS1, Beavers will present her debut solo show, World War Me, at Marianne Boesky Gallery from April 30–June 13. The artist’s subjects have primarily revolved around Instagram, memes, stock images, makeup tutorials and food porn. This series differs from her previous paintings in that she is creating her own reference images. Previously, Beavers appropriated images from the internet that spoke to her in some way autobiographically. In this series, she creates her own reference “memes” using her own body and face with the help of Photoshop splicing.
“I like to make my paintings 3D because they take on a life of their own—your body reacts in the space to them, and they look animated when they are photographed,” Beavers explains. “The added dimension embodies the connection, the reaching-out element of social media.”
“I’m trying to make the materials represent the photos I am working from, but building them in three dimensions presents a challenge,” Beavers, who received her MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, says. “The materials run interference, making it harder for me to be faithful to the original photo. This leads to an interrupted photo-real image in that way—the finished painting becomes more abstract.”
In making these self-referential “memes” that she uses for creating her new works, she takes the familiar makeup tutorial format and repurposes it to explore self portrait–like compositions. “I use face paint to paint paintings,” Beavers says, “like de Kooning’s Woman, or people, like Picasso in his underwear, or myself, nude on my face or lips. I take selfies while
I’m painting my face and cut those images together in Photoshop to create a final Photoshopped file, which I create the painting from.” The exhibition will include familiar themes in her work that riff on her earlier explorations of food, such as her iconic burgers and cakes that have been merged with anxious cropped images of the body.
“I love the idea that memes circulate widely as ads for the self, for someone’s humor or savvy or ‘not giving a fuck-ness,’ not for any kind of traditional product,” Beavers says. Examples of memes she has made that have been transformed into paintings for this series are “Emoji Burger crotch” and “Eggplant Emoji nails.” The artist is also working on some works that incorporate skulls, Maurizio Cattelan’s scandalous banana, and a cake in the shape of a butt revealing a patriotic layered sponge.
Beavers’s playful and thought-provoking works seduce the viewer to lean in, tempting them to touch or even eat the paintings. She creates an atmosphere of enchantment and humor in her seemingly surrealist work. What is most endearing about Beavers is her radical sense of originality—she may borrow from many sources, but she remains authentically herself.