BY TRAVIS DIEHL AND ANDREW RUSSETH
Through Oct. 5. Marianne Boesky Gallery, 507 West 24th Street, Manhattan; 212-680-9889, marianneboeskygallery.com.
Gina Beavers, an artist in New Jersey, also organized a winning group show this summer: a menagerie of art informed by quotidian items (a Claes Oldenburg sundae, a Samara Golden breakfast table) at Marianne Boesky Gallery. Now she is back with “Divine Consumer,” a curveball of a solo show. Known for relief paintings of social-media snapshots, such as outlandish manicures and luscious cheeseburgers, she has taken a subdued turn here.
Beavers dropped images of home décor from online ads (the kind that follow you around the internet after you view a product on Amazon) into Photoshop, transforming them into collages that she sculpted with foam, putty and paper pulp, before finishing them with paint.
Fourteen of these pieces, some quite large and all beguiling, are at Boesky. A scarlet blanket has become a craggy abstraction (or a mess of intestines), while pink and red towels, sliced and stacked, suggest fantastical architecture. Digital junk yields new life. In the six-foot-tall “Yellow gingham ascension (cushions, drapes, pillows),” 2024, a series of cushions float heavenward.
If Beavers previously laid bare the grotesque but intoxicating nature of what goes viral, here she is plumbing the slippery, sticky nature of today’s images, which morph as they vie for clicks and cash online.
Her earnest treatment of deadpan ideas has a comic effect, and a certain poignancy, but spend enough time with her “comfortcore paintings” (as she calls them) and a sense of unease may overtake you. At once banal and strange, these meaty objects are not quite what they purport to be — a very of-the-moment condition.
