Avery Singer: Unity Bachelor, ICA, Miami

A leading artist of her generation, Avery Singer uses innovative tools to create iconic, complex paintings that interpret contemporary social realities and technologies. The artist’s large-scale paintings portray worlds that emerge from digital renderings and take shape through manual and digital airbrush techniques, liquid and solid masking, and complex layering processes. Singer’s work has often engaged modernist and avant-garde movements to cite the radical potential for painting. Works in this exhibition reference Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912), through which Singer explores issues of form, memory, and the sensation of falling.

Alongside these works, Singer debuts a new body of work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, that reflects on identities on- and offline. These new paintings feature a trio of figures the artist has purchased from commercial vendors like Sketchfab and Quixel, creating a narrative through animation and design software including Daz 3D and Cinema 4D. Singer has set a couple—Unity Bachelor and Priya Prasad—in New York in 2001, a coming-of-age period and place for the artist. Their fictionalized love story is marked by the collective trauma of September 11, 2001, when Priya goes missing, while a third figure, a drunk art student, who throughout Singer’s career has doubled as a kind of self-portrait, roams Lower Manhattan.