Wielding a sword as she sits triumphantly in the gridded, 3D-modelled metaverse, the monumental and luminously pink warrioress of Avery Singer’s Kundry testifies to the artist’s revolutionary material intervention into unbound narrative and virtual realms. A virtuoso of the airbrush, Singer combines computer technologies with her own painterly hand in Kundry to painstakingly depict and reinterpret the eponymous mythical character from Richard Wagner’s late nineteenth-century opera Parsifal, as if she were here rendered in a high-fidelity print from digital modelling software. Executed in 2017-2018, Kundry is a brilliant articulation of Avery Singer’s highly original and contemporary visual mode – a zeitgeist-defining contemporary sensibility that blurs the boundaries between painting and technology; digital and analog; reality and perception. A testament to the present work’s significance in Singer’s career, Kundry prominently featured in Days of the Week (Computer Pain), her seminal 2018 solo exhibition at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York, and belongs to a critically acclaimed series that extends her radically inventive visual vernacular with its painterly mimicry of Internet-based aesthetics and digital imaging processes.

By seamlessly synthesizing automated technologies and traditional painting techniques, Singer has invented a singular aesthetic lexicon that defies visual expectations and pushes the boundaries of contemporary painting. First drafting images using Google SketchUp, a 3D rendering architectural software, the artist then projects preliminary underdrawings onto her canvas before painting them with geometric precision using masking tape and airbrush. As seen in the gridded confines that constructs the background of Kundry, Singer also recreates the illusionistic and infinite space that can be rendered by 3D computer modelling software in the flat planarity of the canvas surface. Speaking about the motif of a grid that structures her work, Singer reflects on her process: “[I] utilize the architectural idea of scaling up a grid and relating it to another grid, because anyone can understand what a grid is. It’s a Cartesian idea of space that we’ve all grown up with. We executed the painting from background to foreground, painting the shadows first, then I hand brushed the shadows of the brushstrokes, wherever color was occurring.” (Avery Singer quoted in Orit Gat, “Venice Biennale artist, Avery Singer talks processes, robots, and post-human painting,” Art Basel, 5 June 2022 (online))

Occupying the surreal interstice between digital and material worlds, Kundry manifests by Singer’s hand the magic of a mathematically generated picture. Painstakingly precise, Singer’s dexterous technical replication of automated digital imagery belies its fundamental qualities as a painting, which only become apparent upon very close inspection. Where we see areas where paint has bled under taped borders between planes, or where directional qualities of applied paint vary, Singer exposes the distinct character of her own painterly hand. A consummate example of the artist’s radical practice, Kundry sees Singer simultaneously bridge and expose the phenomenological tension between the human hand and mechanical technology, the flat canvas and the limitless digital domain. In the artist’s own words, "I want to make work that explores something that I haven’t seen in painting before. I guess it’s really a question of being generational – making art that belongs to your generation in some way.” (Avery Singer quoted in Taylor Dafoe, “At 31, the Painter Avery Singer is a Bona Fide Art Star. She’s Trying Very Hard Not to Let That Get in Her Way,” Artnet, 20 May 2019 (online))

The title of Avery Singer’s Kundry recalls a mythological woman invented by German composer Richard Wagner for his epic 1882 opera Parsifal, where she is neither a warrior nor a royal, but instead a mysterious and wild woman who is ultimately cursed to live forever after laughing at Christ on the cross. A composite of timeless Western female archetypes like the Loathly Damsel and Wicked Maiden from which Wagner drew literary influence, Kundry represents a polarized operatic woman, struggling between sin and redemption, good and evil, and deception and truth. In the present work, however, Singer represents this mythic character from one of the oldest forms of art with contemporary painterly reinterpretation, dramatically reincarnating her as an armored and regal swordswoman who reigns victorious in an impossible, computerized environment. Glowing with a pink halo of victory as if a heroine in a video game, the tragically cursed Kundry of Wagner’s classical libretto is now an undefeated champion of Avery Singer’s painterly universe, bespeaking the artist’s incisive commentary about the possibilities of reinterpretation and rebirth that lie in the infinite expanse of digital terrain.

In the illusionistic and mythological allure of Kundry, Singer embraces technologies of spatial rendering and imaging, and, more broadly, the fictional and allegorical nature of such virtual reality itself. Indeed, in artist Sven Loven’s exegesis on Singer’s visual vocabulary, he observes, “Through the lies of illusionism, the deceit of simulacra (depth of field, picture-in-picture, soft focus), [Singer’s images] seek to assure us of the validity of our own confusion in the face of cacophony. It is in this assurance that we can find comfort and peace, ground to stand on.” (Sven Loven, “The Cold Standard of Drifting Worlds,” Kunsthalle Zurich, Exh. Cat., Avery Singer: Pictures Punish Words, 2015, p. 5) The fantastical portrait of Wagner’s operatic Kundry in the present work captures the radical poeisis of Avery Singer’s oeuvre, evincing her technological dexterity and witty imagination as it posits a new place for painting that befits the Internet era.

Artist

Avery Singer