Gina Beavers: Divine Consumer at Marianne Boesky Gallery, NYC
Sept 5 – Oct 5, 2024
Gina Beavers’ Comfortcore Paintings marks a pivotal shift in her artistic practice, moving away from the overtly social media-derived imagery that once characterized her work. In this latest body of work, Beavers delves into the seemingly benign world of online retail, transforming mundane domestic goods into tactile, textured relief paintings. The artist reinterprets the plush fabrics and soft tones of towels, blankets, and cushions that populate our endless stream of advertisements, crafting works that offer a painterly abstraction of the products they portray. With foam and paper pulp as her materials of choice, Beavers gives these quotidian objects a striking physicality, blurring the lines between the digital and the tangible. These objects, once flat and fleeting, now assume a weight and presence that invite both contemplation and touch.
Yet, beneath the comforting aesthetic of these works lies Beavers’ continued interrogation of digital life, particularly the way we consume and construct identity through the internet. In her earlier works, she mined the often grotesque perfectionism of makeup tutorials, food porn, and gym selfies, highlighting the tension between online spectacle and real-life banality. Now, in Comfortcore, she retreats from this cacophony of personal branding and performative aesthetics, turning instead to the quieter but no less pervasive realm of digital advertising. These ads, ever-present in our feeds and sidebars, become a new kind of self-portraiture for Beavers. They reflect not who we are but what we are coaxed into desiring—offering comfort in a world of online chaos and discord.
Beavers’ shift from the loud, often garish world of internet culture to the softer, more subdued realm of retail advertising signals her reckoning with the evolution of the internet itself. In her exploration of the soothing textures and comforting patterns of home decor, Beavers addresses a collective longing for solace in the face of a fractured digital existence. Her works are not just painterly abstractions but meditations on the tension between comfort and consumption, offering a quiet commentary on our relationship with both the digital world and the domestic spaces that we fill with these mass-produced goods.
