Throughout her practice, Gina Beavers (b. 1974; Athens, Greece) examines notions of selfhood and the construction of identity through the lens of online media consumption. With a remarkable fluency in the particular visual vernacular of the internet, Beavers reimagines various aspects of online culture—makeup tutorials, memes, food porn, bodybuilding selfies, and digital advertisements—in sculptural relief paintings that intrigue and repulse in equal measure. Mining the calculated, surreal perfection of the images she encounters on her own Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok feeds, Beavers’s paintings operate as a sort of self portrait visualized through endless scrolling and liking and commenting.
Beavers’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, New York, NY in 2019 and at Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen, Germany in 2021, and her work will be featured in forthcoming exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL. Beavers's work has also been included in group presentations at Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica – Palazzo Barberini; the Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, Italy; Mazovian Contemporary Art Museum, Radom, Poland; Barns Art Center, New York, NY; Schlossmuseum Linz, Austria;The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands; Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, KY. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Perez Art Museum Miami, FL; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway: RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, China; and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel. Reviews of her work have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Frieze Magazine, Artforum, and Art in America, among others. In 2024, Beavers curated Material World, a group exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery. Beavers earned an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MS in Education from Brooklyn College, and a BA in Studio Art and Anthropology from the University of Virginia. She served as an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University from 2019–2020. Beavers lives and works in the Oranges, New Jersey.