‘I'm interested in the ways in which artists have removed the hand from painting using technology,’ she says

Venice Biennale artist, Avery Singer talks processes, robots, and post-human painting  

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The daughter of two artists,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/10651/Avery-Singer" target="_blank">Avery Singer</a>&nbsp;was born and raised in New York City, growing up in a Tribeca loft. Her parents named her after the painter&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/13519/Milton-Avery" target="_blank">Milton Avery</a>, whose work she would see at the Museum of Modern Art, where her father worked as a projectionist. Drawing on this intellectual heritage, Singer’s work combines programs such as SketchUp and the modeling software DAZ 3D with references to the Dutch Golden Age. Computers and projectors have become emblematic of Singer’s process, which shifts from digital to painting, asking questions about the limits and possibilities of both.&nbsp;Ahead of her participation in the 58th Venice Biennale, she spoke with Orit Gat about her new airbrush tool (ordinarily used to paint airplanes), her upcoming commission for the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and her new works in Venice and Basel, where they'll be presented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1391/Kraupa-Tuskany-Zeidler-K-T-Z" target="_blank">Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler</a>.

Orit Gat: You’re working on a Museum Ludwig commission, the second of the institution’s biennially held Schultze Projects [the first was with Wade Guyton in 2017], for which a contemporary artist is invited to make a mural for the museum’s main stairwell, in memory of the artist Bernard Schultze. What are you planning?Avery Singer: I am working with a new technique: it involves using a digitized airbrushing system that operates on an X, Y, and Z axis. You make a primitive 3D file for it, as well as a color file, and it airbrushes based on the directives you give it. I'm interested in the ways in which artists have removed the hand from painting using technology.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8498/Wade-Guyton" target="_blank">Wade Guyton</a>&nbsp;is printing with a flatbed printer.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8049/Christopher-Wool" target="_blank">Christopher Wool</a>&nbsp;uses silk screening, as does&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/11701/Laura-Owens" target="_blank">Laura Owens</a>.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7393/Albert-Oehlen" target="_blank">Albert Oehlen</a>&nbsp;did these computer paintings that were printed, I think, using a flatbed and silk screen. I wanted to have my own way of doing this, using a technology that no one else would have used, something that would be closer to the airbrushing that I have been doing by hand in my previous paintings. I found a company in Japan that was making a machine mainly used for printing logos on trucks and airplanes. I reached out to a dealer in Switzerland and asked if I could rent his workshop for a few weeks to experiment with it. I went there, and, within a month, I made five paintings for an exhibition I did at Secession, in Vienna, in 2016.

Do you envision your role as gallerists as generational?To offer a platform for new aesthetics and experimental expression while providing the relevant context has always been our main objective. At the same time, we are always driven by our own interests and curiosity. As a consequence we often engage with visions and ideas that we feel strongly drawn toward, but that we don’t fully comprehend yet. For us, art becomes really exciting if it exceeds any didactic, legible, and coherent mode, and rather works as a catalyst for new ways of looking at the world and its current political, social, economic, and cultural issues. That could probably be described as being contemporary or generational.Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler organized the first exhibitions of international artists like Auer, Andrea Crespo,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/9413/Guan-Xiao" target="_blank">Guan Xiao</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/12751/GCC" target="_blank">GCC</a>, Novitskova, and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/10651/Avery-Singer" target="_blank">Avery Singer</a>. What do these artists have in common?We have always been interested in practices that operate outside linear ways of thinking and engage with subversive, non-hierarchical, and hybrid forms of production. Phenomena like syncretism, digitalization, image economies, and post-human tendencies play a key role in the gallery program. Of course it is exciting if the artists we represent share certain objectives or interests and thereby inform each other. But ultimately we are interested in individual artistic practices.

It feels like the subject of your paintings is often image-making itself.I wanted to illustrate something that anyone could look at. You’re going to see a depiction of photographic space in a digital image but painted.Is it important that the process is visible?In painting, we have become used to seeing process, to seeing how paintings are made. It’s something Isabelle Graw writes about in her book [The Love of Painting, 2018] which she calls the ‘vitalistic fantasy’ – being able to tie your own subjective experience of perceiving the first to the last stroke of the brush. It’s this romanticized connection between understanding, emotion, and decision-making – a thought process the viewer can follow almost from start to finish. I actually want to remove that connection, I think it’s way more interesting that you would not be able to have that relationship to it.And what replaces it?Something where there is no start and no understanding of where the artist’s hand was.&nbsp;Look at Untitled [2019]. It started when I asked the animator I work with to make a model of a&nbsp;woman with her hands in front of her face as if she were showing off her manicure. And then I added face tattoos and scars, and so on, to her face and hands. Then, I completed a digital-airbrush underpainting of that. I did it and then thought, ‘It’s executed but it doesn’t have a painterly language,’ which I wanted it to have. So I thought I would try to make it look like there was a piece of glass between her face and her hands. I went back into the model, took a photo, taped up that area, sprayed an outline, then colored on top of it. There’s this white outline that does not translate as a reflection. It just looks like an image that’s there. Then I added the dripping-down effect, as if it’s liquid running down a pane of glass. I don’t even know what it is anymore. But for me, what’s interesting is that it started from this file of a woman that we made up. And I don’t know if I’ve seen another person try to make a photo-realistic painting of such a model before. It’s a weird thing to try to do – photo-realism of a thing that doesn’t exist.The 58th Biennale dell' Arte, ‘May you live in interesting times’, curated by Ralph Rugoff, takes place from May 10th until November 24th 2019. The 2019 edition of Art Basel's Basel show will take place from June 13th to June 16th in Basel, Switzerland. Orit Gat is a writer and editor based in New York City.Top Image:&nbsp;Avery Singer, Untitled, 2019 (detail). Courtesy the artist and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin.

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她指出說：「我對藝術家以科技代替雙手來繪畫感到很有興趣。」