Gina Beavers | Divine Consumer: (No Prices)

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Divine Consumer, an exhibition of new paintings by Gina Beavers (b. 1974; Athens, Greece). For her newest body of work—the Comfortcore Paintings—Beavers transforms into intimate textured relief paintings an endless digital stream of domestic goods for sale in a seductive range of comforting patterns, colors, and textures.

 

Throughout her practice, Beavers 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 and memes, food porn and bodybuilding selfies—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.

With Divine Consumer, Beavers retreats from the social media-derived narrative subjects that have defined her work since the early 2000s, looking instead to the barrage of advertising that permeates our digital lives. For the Comfortcore Paintings, Beavers borrows product photos of home decor—towels, blankets, pillows, curtains, and sheets—from Google and Amazon retail ads that follow internet users through their online lives, appearing in social feeds, on the sidebar of every website visited, within every article read. Pulling these found images into Photoshop, Beavers reworks them into intuitive, improvisational photo collages that draw on traditional painting genres—particularly still life and landscape. Beavers then recreates the images on canvas, sculpting the forms and textures with foam and paper pulp before finishing them with oil paint. In the resulting paintings, Beavers transforms quotidian domestic textiles—linen, chunky knits, terry cloth, upholstery—into painterly abstraction. 
 
The Comfortcore Paintings represent a significant departure in Beavers’s work. Instead of painting caricatures of images sourced directly from her feed, she transforms elements of the internet user experience into a palette through which she creates entirely new compositions, the resulting images softer, more delicate, and more painterly than her previous work. This evident shift in Beavers’s practice is, in many ways, a reaction to changes in the internet itself. “The early internet,” Trick Mirror author Jia Tolentino wrote in 2019, “had been constructed around lines of affinity, and whatever good spaces remain on the internet are still the product of affinity and openness. But when the internet moved to an organizing principle of opposition, much of what had formerly been surprising and rewarding and curious became tedious, noxious, and grim.” Much of the novelty—the joy, the excitement, the fun—that defined the internet of the 2010s has died, leaving raw anxiety in its wake. 
 
Faced with the antagonism, opposition, and argumentation that define the current state of the internet, Beavers looks inward, retreating to the cool comfort and certainty of digital advertising. Advertisements—even as they follow us around the internet—contain no hidden agenda; they ask us to buy, and nothing more. Amid the endless discord and strife of online platforms, the constant pressure to perform in ever more extreme ways, Beavers turns to retail therapy—a tale as old as capitalism itself—shopping for physical comfort in the form of oversized armchairs and cozy blankets and soft pillows. Yet, even as the content of Beavers’s paintings shifts from explicit manifestations of garish internet culture to more subtle intonations of the online—her work remains autobiographical: a self-portrait of an artist hunting for some semblance of divine comfort amidst a splintered and fractured digital landscape.

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