Gina Beavers (born 1974) is an American artist based in the New York area.Museum of Modern Art
Gina Beavers, The Life I Deserve
Exhibitions, 2019. Retrieved March 24, 2023. She first gained attention in the early 2010s for thickly painted, relief-like acrylic images of food, cosmetics techniques and bodybuilders appropriated from

Instagram Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can ...

snapshots and

selfie A selfie () is a self-portrait photograph, typically taken with a digital camera or smartphone, which may be held in the hand or supported by a selfie stick. Selfies are often shared on social media, via social networking services such as F ...

s found using hashtags such as #foodporn, #sixpack and #makeuptutorial.Griffin, Jonathan
"Body Work: The relief paintings of Gina Beavers,"
''Frieze'', May 2016. Retrieved March 24, 2023.Shultz, Oliver
Gina Beavers
''MoMA Magazine'', July 18, 2019. Retrieved March 24, 2023. Her later work has continued to recombine these recurrent subjects, as well as explore memes, irreverent conflations of genres or art history and kitsch, identity, fandom and celebrity-worship.Smith, Roberta

''The New York Times'', October 8, 2020, p. C6. Retrieved March 27, 2023.Schaar, Elise
"Gina Beavers, Carl Kostyál,"
''Artforum'', February 2018. Retrieved March 24, 2023.Fiske, Courtney
"Gina Beavers,"
''Artforum'', September 2014. Retrieved March 24, 2023.Mizota, Sharon

''Los Angeles Times'', December 14, 2015. Retrieved March 24, 2023. In 2019, ''New York Times'' critic Martha Schwendener described her paintings as "canny statements on contemporary bodies, beauty and culture … hattackle the weirdness of immaterial images floating through the ether, building them up into something monumental, rather than dismissing them."Schwendener Martha
"What to See in New York Art Galleries this Week: Gina Beavers,"
''The New York Times'', August 14, 2019, p. C14. Retrieved March 27, 2023. Beavers has exhibited at institutions including MoMA PS1,Kitnick, Alex
" Greater New York, MoMA PS1,"
''Artforum'', January 2016. Retrieved March 24, 2023. the Frans Hals Museum (Netherlands),Frans Hals Museum
"Image Power,"
Exhibitions, 2020. Retrieved March 27, 2023.

Nassau County Museum of Art The Nassau County Museum of Art (NCMA) is located east of New York City on the former Frick "Clayton" Estate, a property in Roslyn Harbor in the heart of Long Island’s Gold Coast. The main museum building, named in honor of art collectors a ...

and KMAC Contemporary Art Museum.KMAC Museum
"Food Shelter Clothing,"
Exhibitions, 2015. Retrieved March 27, 2023. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Whitney Museum,Whitney Museum of American Art
Gina Beavers
Artists. Retrieved March 24, 2023.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's o ...

,Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
"MOCA Announces 2022 Acquisitions,"
News. January 31, 2023. Retrieved March 24, 2023. and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami,Institute of Contemporary Art Miami
Gina Beavers, ''Money Lips'', 2018
Collection. Retrieved March 24, 2023. among others. She lives and works in Orange, New Jersey.Mellin, Haley
"Gina Beavers Explores the Complexities of an Online Self,"
''Garage'', October 9, 2020. Retrieved March 27, 2023.

Early life and career

Beavers was born in 1974 in

Athens Athens ( ; el, Αθήνα, Athína ; grc, Ἀθῆναι, Athênai (pl.) ) is both the capital and largest city of Greece. With a population close to four million, it is also the seventh largest city in the European Union. Athens dominates ...

, Greece into a diplomatic family and grew up moving between Europe and the US.Gnyp, Marta. "#artporn – Painting in the age of social media," ''Zoo Magazine'', September 2016.Blumenstein, Ellen. "The Structure of Enjoyment on Instagram," i
''Gina Beavers''
Berlin: GNYP, 2018. Retrieved March 24, 2023. She attended the

University of Virginia The University of Virginia (UVA) is a Public university#United States, public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the university is ranked among the top academic institutions in the United S ...

and received a BA in studio art and anthropology in 1996.Hauser, EJ
"Gina Beavers with EJ Hauser,"
''The Brooklyn Rail'', October 2020. Retrieved March 27, 2023. She initially painted in a cartoonish, narrative vein, but turned to

hard-edge abstraction Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Co ...

in graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned an MFA in painting and drawing in 2000. After moving to New York City, she got an MS in art education from

Brooklyn College Brooklyn College is a public university in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York. It is part of the City University of New York system and enrolls about 15,000 undergraduate and 2,800 graduate students on a 35-acre campus. Being New York City's first publ ...

in 2005 and taught art at a Brooklyn K–8 school for twelve years until 2015. By 2010, Beavers had begun experimenting with ways to incorporate a sculpted, handmade element into her work and turned to the internet and social media as sources of imagery. This new work brought her early critical attention through group shows in and around New York CityRusseth, Andrew. "The 15 Hottest Artists of the Summer," ''Gallerist NY'', July 24, 2012.Smith, Roberta
"Draw Gym,"
''The New York Times'', September 26, 2013, p. C32. Retrieved March 24, 2023. and solo exhibitions at James Fuentes Gallery and Clifton Benevento in New York,Chamberlain, Colby
"Gina Beavers, Clifton Benevento,"
''Artforum'', February 2013, p. 246–47. Retrieved March 24, 2023. among others.Smith, Matthew. "Le Sigh: Gina Beavers at Nudashank," ''New American Paintings'', February 24, 2012. Her inclusion in the 2015 MoMA PS1 "Greater New York" show increased this level of public recognition.Saltz, Jerry. "Goulding the Lolly," ''New York Magazine'', July 2016. In subsequent years, Beavers has had solo exhibitions at Michael Benevento Gallery (Los Angeles),Horst, Aaron. "Gina Beavers at Michael Benevento," ''Carla'' May 17, 2018. GNYP Gallery (Berlin),Blumenstein, Ellen
"Ambitchous, GNYP Gallery in Berlin, Germany,"
''Meer'', March 18, 2017. Retrieved March 27, 2023. Carl Kostyál Gallery (London and Stockholm), MoMA PS1 (the 2019 survey, "The Life I Deserve")Kent, Charlotte
"Gina Beavers: The Life I Deserve,"
''The Brooklyn Rail'', June 2019. Retrieved March 24, 2023. and

Marianne Boesky Gallery Marianne Boesky Gallery is an art gallery located in the New York City neighborhood of Chelsea and Aspen, Colorado. Founded in 1996 in Soho by Marianne Boesky, it specializes in contemporary art. It represents established artists like Frank Stella ...

(New York),''Artforum''. News
"Gina Beavers joins Marianne Boesky Gallery,"
July 26, 2019. Retrieved March 24, 2023. Various Small Fires (Seoul),Chung, Hayoung
"Gina Beavers, Various Small Fires,"
''Artforum'', February 17, 2021. Retrieved March 24, 2023. and Neuer Essener Kunstverein (Germany). She has also appeared in group exhibitions at the FLAG Art Foundation,Flag Art Foundation
"Among Friends: Three Views of a Collection,"
Exhibitions, 2022. Retrieved March 27, 2023.

Gavin Brown's Enterprise Gavin Brown's enterprise was an art gallery with venues in New York City and Rome owned by Gavin Brown between 1994 and 2020. In 2020, it merged with Gladstone Gallery. History Broome Street The gallery was established by Gavin Brown in 1994 on ...

Wolkoff, Julia. "Goulding the Lolly," ''Art in America'', July 2016. and Frans Hals Museum, among others.

Work and reception

Beavers's work is frequently regarded as being two-fold in nature: concerned both with fetish-like social media preoccupations involving the body and identity and with painting itself as a subject—its cultural status, unique qualities and limitations.Herbert, Martin. "Made You Look," in ''Gina Beavers: All My Addictions'', London/Stockholm/Milan: Carl Kostyál, 2022. Retrieved March 24, 2023. Beavers bases her paintings on snapshots from social media subgenres that embody contemporary modes of consumption and desire defined by excess and differentiation: "

food porn Food porn (or foodporn) is a glamourized visual presentation of cooking or eating in advertisements, infomercials, blogs, cooking shows, and other visual media. Its origins come from a restaurant review e-commerce platform called Foodporn. Food ...

," makeup tutorials, body painting and bodybuilder selfies. Critics have likened her position toward this subject matter (and her own output) as that "of a disinterested anthropologist" situated between fascination and critique. Her work engages the power of "high" and "low" cultural images and their effects on selfhood, offering uncanny or unsettling visions of digitally mediated life marked by a mix of shamelessness and self-abasement. She often blurs categories and genres in mashups of art history, kitsch and the body, for example, the painting ''

Starry Night ''The Starry Night'' ( nl, De sterrennacht) is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. Painted in June 1889, it depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provenc ...

Vincent van Gogh Vincent Willem van Gogh (; 30 March 185329 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionism, Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2 ...

as rendered in Bacon'' (2016), grotesque image combinations (burgers and vaginas, cake and butt cheek), or pats of paint on a palette formed into cupcakes. ''Friezes Jonathan Griffin observed, "In Beavers’s paintings, the body is often conflated with the artwork, soliciting the gaze of others but also anxious to control it or deflect it through illusion." Beavers re-endows ephemeral digital images with sculptural heft and tactility built by piling dense accumulations of acrylic paint and medium, foam and other materials.Fry, Naomi. "We Are All Kim: The Paintings of Gina Beavers," i
''Gina Beavers''
Berlin: GNYP, 2018. Retrieved March 24, 2023. Critics connect this emphasis on materiality and the body to painterly, carnal traditions of oil painting extending back to artists such as Goya and

Titian Tiziano Vecelli or Vecellio (; 27 August 1576), known in English as Titian ( ), was an Italians, Italian (Republic of Venice, Venetian) painter of the Renaissance, considered the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school (art), ...

, as well as to more unruly, embodied aspects of Pop art.Chamberlain, Colby. "Acrylic and the Painterly," i
''Gina Beavers''
Berlin: GNYP, 2018. Retrieved March 24, 2023.Smith, Roberta

''The New York Times'', December 7, 2012, p. C28. Retrieved March 24, 2023. They suggest that her translations of digital imagery subject them to the logic of painting, introducing notions of singularity and temporality while divesting them of inherent qualities such as similarity, ubiquity and reproducibility. The discrepancy between Beavers's bulging, rough matte forms and their often-slick screen-based sources highlights the gap between digital exemplars and messier, physical lives. Furthermore, her paintings often undermine the original intent of snapshots to be appetizing, appealing or sexy, rendering them as "repulsive and alluring," and "enticing and abject" according to reviewers.Cotter, Holland

''The New York Times'', April 17, 2015, p. C34. Retrieved March 24, 2023. In a similar way, Beaver's painting technique calls into question (mostly male) painting traditions, even as it invokes them. She uses acrylic paint—associated with modern flatness and matte texture as opposed to oil's richness— and paints in an intentionally clumsy manner with thick, relief-like protrusions that rejects both mastery and illusionistic depth.

Early solo exhibitions

The expressive, impasto acrylic paintings in Beavers's first two solo exhibitions in 2012 were grounded in awkward, social-media photographs involving bodybuilding and body painting, with titles frequently derived from captions or comments that originally accompanied them. She recreated them as jarring, close-up reliefs of grotesquely muscled male torsos, bulging female breasts and bodies covered with images of animals or art-historical motifs (''Gator'' or ''Mondrian'', both 2012) that Andrew Russeth characterized as "meaty paintings with pleasantly creepy volume." In her exhibition of the same year, "Palate" (the title a homophone for "palette"), she turned to small, low-relief works based on online food photography.Scott, Andrea K. "Gina Beavers at Clifton Benevento," ''The New Yorker'', December 8, 2012. The depictions ranging from marbled meat, oysters and shellfish to less exalted offerings (e.g., ''Food Porn! (Chicken & Waffles)'' and ''

Applebees Applebee's Restaurants LLC. is an American company that develops, franchises, and operates the Applebee's Neighborhood Grill + Bar restaurant chain. The Applebee's concept focuses on casual dining, with mainstream American dishes such as salads ...

!'', 2012) and employed unorthodox materials (pumice stone, glass beads) to better capture the textures of foods like pie crust or dipping sauce. ''New York Times'' critic Roberta Smith wrote that Beavers "exaggerated and satirized both the act of painting and the fetishization of food by professional photographers and hungry diners … captur ngcertain extremes of indulgence that verge on gross." She and others connected the paintings (e.g., ''Red Velvet Cake'') back to the messy sensuality of earlier work, such as

Carolee Schneemann Carolee Schneemann (October 12, 1939 – March 6, 2019) was an American visual experimental artist, known for her multi-media works on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and ...

's ''Meat Joy'' (1964), Claes Oldenburg's anthropomorphic ''Store'' (1961), Red Grooms's painted sculptures and

Photorealism Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium. Although the term can be ...

. Beavers returned to the body in the exhibitions "Re-Animator" (2014) and "Popography" (2015) with mostly square, often gridded paintings that matched typical formats of Instagram. In subject matter, they focused on cosmetics how-tos for "sun-kissed lips" and "smoky eye" (''Maquillaje (Make-up)'', 2015) or straight-on, tightly cropped facial features (''Who Has Braces'', 2014). ''Los Angeles Times'' critic Sharon Mizota suggested that the thickly built, sticky accretions undid the gloss and sense of effortless glamour of their digital sources, operating "somewhere between critique and affection" and aesthetic and didactic objects to "cinematic and thoroughly surreal" effect. ''Artforum'' described them as "less pictorial than topographic" ''nature morte'' objects that positioned "paint's materiality as a metonym for that of the body's, making the latter seem cadaverous by comparison," as in ''Crotch Shots from the Getty Villa'' (2014), a five-part grid of Greco-Roman genitalia snapped from museum statuary.

Later work

In later shows, Beavers has introduced new subjects alongside recurrent ones. The exhibition "Ambitchous" (2017) juxtaposed makeup tutorial images with carnivalesque instructions for dressing up as cartoon characters such as

Cruella de Vil Cruella de Vil is a fictional character in British author Dodie Smith's 1956 novel ''The Hundred and One Dalmatians''. A pampered and glamorous London heiress and fashion designer, she appears in Walt Disney Productions' 17th animated feature fi ...

and Elsa from the film ''

Frozen Frozen may refer to: * the result of freezing * a paralysis response in extreme cases of fear Films * ''Frozen'' (1997 film), a film by Wang Xiaoshuai * ''Frozen'' (2005 film), a film by Juliet McKoen * ''Frozen'' (2007 film), a film by Sh ...

'' (2013); reviews noted in the work and show's portmanteau title a contemporary attitude positioned ambiguously between female self-affirmation and ruthlessness. In "Tennis Ball Yellow" (2017), Beavers presented large-scale relief paintings of '' papier-mâché''-formed paintboxes and sports balls that popped out from light-pink canvases lined like sports fields and pouting grass-green lips (''Lip Balls'', 2017). The show also included four-sided square paintings on plinth-like cubes that offered multiple viewing angles of their protruding forms. In subsequent shows, such as "World War Me" (2020), Beavers examined identity and the ubiquitous presence of the female face and body in art and advertising through the lens of a fractured social-media self-consciousness craving recognition and popularity.McLean, Matthew
"The Art of the Feast: Understanding the Glorification of Gluttony,"
''Frieze'', October 4, 2021. Retrieved March 27, 2023. Her boldly painted reliefs depicted enlarged, often repeating features (lips, hands, fake nails), faces and torsos in bikini underwear flaunting art-historical (Van Gogh,

Picasso Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...

, Mondrian and others) and consumer culture motifs. Roberta Smith wrote, "These works conflate all kinds of self-improvement and adornment projects: makeup, tattoos, cosmetic surgery and nail art as well as fandom and celebrity-worship. Their blaring billboard power from afar is countered by a squirm-worthy intimacy up close." For the Seoul exhibition, "Passionaries" (2021), Beavers infused typical subjects with local flavor in ''Korean Fried Chicken'' and several ''

Parasite Parasitism is a close relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives on or inside another organism, the host, causing it some harm, and is adapted structurally to this way of life. The entomologist E. O. Wilson has ...

''-themed works that referenced the 2019 film by Korean director

Bong Joon-ho Bong Joon-ho (, ; Hanja: 奉俊昊; born September 14, 1969) is a South Korean film director, producer and screenwriter. The recipient of four Academy Awards, his filmography is characterised by emphasis on social themes, genre-mixing, black h ...

. She presented "Pastel Looks" in 2022, a show of flat pastel drawings that reviewers noted still managed to convey her characteristic sense of depth.Laster, Paul
"6 Must-See Gallery Shows in July 2022,"
''Galerie'', July 5, 2022. Retrieved March 27, 2023. The drawings focused on grids of lipstick tutorials and nail and food images, such as the humorous ''Hot Dog Nails Drawing'' (2022), which portrayed a hand with hot dog-decorated fingernails.

Collections

Beavers' work belongs to the public collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Kistefos Museum and Sculpture Park (Norway), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Perez Art Museum Miami,

Tel Aviv Museum of Art Tel Aviv Museum of Art ( he, מוזיאון תל אביב לאמנות ''Muzeon Tel Aviv Leomanut'') is an art museum in Tel Aviv, Israel. The museum is dedicated to the preservation and display of modern and contemporary art from Israel and aroun ...

, and Whitney Museum.Exhibition A
Gina Beavers
Collections. Retrieved March 24, 2023.Felsberg, Kaylie
"Gina Beavers’s Sculptural Paintings Make Waves at Fairs and Auctions,"
''Artsy'', October 19, 2021. Retrieved March 24, 2023.

Early life and career

Work and reception

Early solo exhibitions

Later work

Collections

References

External links