Petra Cortright, YAMAHA CDRW-4260T_vampire erotica archives TYPOGRAPHY MICROSOFT (2021), via Foxy Production
On view this month at Foxy Production, the gallery has assembled a show of new works by the artist Petra Cortright, marking her third solo exhibition with the gallery. Presenting images framed as “distillations” of the imagery that dominates our every day, this new series of digital paintings uses Angel Wing Clematis, a white narrow-petalled climbing-vine flower—thought to symbolize knowledge and aspiration—as its central motif.
Petra Cortright, ultra angel wing absolute (Installation View), via Foxy Production
Cortright’s work depicts fragmented and reconnected still lifes and landscapes: floral arrangements appear to be inside a darkened studio, near a window, in a garden, or by a lake. The artist’s suggestions of place are complicated by their references to the process of painting—by their brushstrokes, lines, smudges, drips, and textured surfaces—by their active, abstracted backgrounds, and by their multiple-perspectives and vantage points. Each time, they are embellished and abstracted by digital strokes and lines that draw from a broad range of art historical tropes, combining themes and epochs into new assemblages of content and context. Her works’ interconnections of genre, subject, mark-making, and color produce a visual flow, where figure, ground, and dimension appear to be in flux.
Petra Cortright, Women of Wrestling_zoid’s bikini links USA TODAY BUSINESS_Tomb+Raider+2 Game (2021), via Foxy Production
The artist’s canvasses are a mix of original and copy: some elements—flowers, leaves, and branches—are photographed in the artist’s garden, while others, including marks, lines, and brushstrokes, are painted in Photoshop or appropriated from the internet. Configurations of objects, forms, and colors reappear in different permutations and combinations across the exhibition, giving the works a serial quality that suggest cels from an animation or the products of a generative software; yet, though the artist’s studio and tools may be embodied in her computer, her hand is always present. Her paintings can be seen as maps or traces of her actions in front of the screen. They read like bursts of imagination and performance that have somehow fissured out from the mantle of an increasingly homogenized and corporatized world.
Petra Cortright, www.fantasyislandgirls.com_stereo by design Spice Girls Nude (2021), via Foxy Production
Reflecting on gesture and space in the digital realm, i.e., as parameters for adjustments and changes, Cortright’s work is a striking interpretation of history through a new lens.
The show closes February 26th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Petra Cortright at Foxy Production [Exhibition Site]
