25 Dec Avery Singer: What You Need to Know About the Painter
Source Credit: Content and images from Artnet News. Read the original article - https://news.artnet.com/art-world/crib-notes-avery-singer-2553114
“Crib Notes” is a quick-read dossier focused on the artists who ranked on our best-sellers list for ultra-contemporary art in our 2024 Mid-Year Intelligence Report.
Trained as a sculptor, Avery Singer’s paintings which have catapulted her to international recognition have retained a deeply sculptural quality. She is known for her use of Google SketchUp—a 3D modelling software popular with both architects and interior designers, which the artist first encountered at Cooper Union college—to assist in the creation of her compositions. Singer has been praised for her unique ability to create depth in her artworks which appear to draw inspiration from Cubism, Constructivism, and Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico.
Singer’s still lifes often have the uncanny quality of a world looked at through virtual reality goggles: her objects don’t seem to be entirely of this world. Initially working in a purely monochrome palette, the young artist began to introduce color around 2016, but her work retained its unique digitally-inflected essence. So precise is Avery in her execution of her paintings that the artist’s hand often ceases to be visible on the surface, adding to the feeling of computer-generation in her paintings.
Singer’s works were acquired into the collections of Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, LA’s Hammer Museum, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, and Whitney and MoMA in New York, all before the artist turned 30. That was by no means the end of Singer’s successes, as in 2019 the 32-year-old became the youngest artist to be signed with Hauser & Wirth and had her works featured at the central pavilion of the Venice Biennale that year.
Singer topped our Intelligence Report’s mid-year ranking of best-selling ultra-contemporary artists (those born after 1974) with her $3,206,000 sale of Happening (2013) at Sotheby’s New York at their ‘The Now Evening Collection’ this May. This result would have seen Singer place a very respectable sixth in the same period last year. For her sales at auction from January to June, Singer achieved a 75 percent sell-through rate (selling three of four lots) which put her in eighth place on our ‘Most-Bankable’ artist list. Singer is new to the list this year, making a powerful debut with $4,238,142 in total sales.
Here is what you need to know about this artist.
Avery Singer, Performance Artists (2012). Courtesy of Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler.
Key details: Born in New York in 1987. Based in New York.
Galleries representing: Hauser & Wirth, Worldwide in collaboration with Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Singer’s first solo show with Hauser & Wirth came in 2021, with “Reality Ender” at the gallery’s New York location. But what made a bigger splash in the international press was Singer’s second solo with Hauser & Wirth, “Free Fall,” in their London gallery in 2023. The show delved into Singer’s experiences as a 14-year-old New Yorker on September 11, 2001. The artist remembers the world-changing event vividly: Singer and her family slept that evening in the projection booth at MoMA, where her father, the artist Greg Singer, worked at the time. One piece in “Free Fall,” unk-righthand.obj (2023), was highlighted in almost all coverage of the show. It depicts a severed hand (which looked like it could almost be part of a computer game, in typical Singer style) which her best friend had found on her windowsill following the collapse of the twin towers.
Breakout Moment: Winner of the 2017 Prix Jean-François Prat, created in memory of the collector and Bredin Prat law firm partner who passed away in 2011. Singer’s first major European prize, the artist won €20,000 ($22,700). Florence Derieux, the former curator-at-large for the Centre Pompidou who presented Singer with the award said “I am particularly happy that the work of Avery Singer is being recognized in France, as she is a very promising artist who I have been watching closely.”
Avery Singer, Self-portrait (summer 2018) (2018). Courtesy of Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler.
Auction record: On May 19, 2022, Singer’s Happening (2014) sold for a record-breaking $5,253,000 at Sotheby’s New York’s “The Now Evening Auction.” The sale made Singer the second highest sale-achiever under 35 at auction, second to Raqib Shaw. A huge 100-by-120 inch canvas painting, Happening beat its mid-estimates by 75 percent. This piece is a separate work to her 2013 painting of the same name, which sold at the same auction at Sotheby’s New York earlier this year for $3,206,000 and earned Singer her place in our mid-year rankings.
Key Quote: “I want to make work that explores something that I haven’t seen in painting before … I guess it’s really a question of being generational—making art that belongs to your generation in some way.” (Artnet News, 2019)
Source Credit: Content and images from Artnet News. Read the original article - https://news.artnet.com/art-world/crib-notes-avery-singer-2553114