Avery Singer – War_overlays

For Zurich Art Weekend 2026, US artist Avery Singer presents new paintings and a site-specific architectural intervention transforming the upstairs Zurich gallery into a space reminiscent of a casino — a charged environment shaped by surveillance.

Within the paintings, Singer expands upon the figure of the poker player: a protagonist that parallels the role of the artist, operating under high stakes, reading patterns, anticipating risk and perceiving what others might overlook. Moving away from animation software, Singer employs open-source and AI-based tools to select and incorporate images drawn from post-2001 contemporary warfare — using references that evoke the mediated violence of the era — to serve as building blocks of her paintings. These fragments function like overlays within a larger composition, foregrounding the harsh realities that persist beyond the studio, yet are easily neglected in the everyday. Notably, Singer’s use of AI to develop the prompts and keywords that initiate aspects of the image generation process further implicates themes of automation and control, while exploring the paradoxes of the digital era.

Born in 1987 in New York, Avery Singer has emerged as a powerful contemporary voice whose work explores the possibilities in the convergence of painting and technology. Her highly distinctive oeuvre incorporates both autobiographical and fictional narratives, reflecting upon the art world today and the wider sweep of art history that she has inherited as a painter. Singer’s pioneering techniques are deployed to question the ways in which images and their distribution in our contemporary world, are increasingly informed by new media and technologies.

Singer has developed a highly original visual vocabulary that evokes established traditions of archival documentation and a preferred iconography that references the familiar art historical notions of the artist, the muse and the ironies suggested by these tropes. At the same time, her dexterous process is highly technologically advanced, yielding completed works characterized by atmospheric spaces conjuring the digital realm. Singer’s nuanced use of industrial automation and three-dimensional computer modeling, such as SketchUp, Blender and DAZ 3D, underpins a complex process of layering. She projects imagery onto large-scale canvases and builds the compositions through airbrushed acrylic paint. The resulting paintings contrast clarity with ambiguity, past with future and geometric precision with intuitively generated forms.

Gallery hours Tue-Fri 11 am – 6 pm, Sat 11 am – 5 pm

Exhibition Duration 12 June – 05 September 2026

www.hauserwirth.com

Location:
Hauser & Wirth
Limmatstrasse 270
8005 Zürich
Switzerland