Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

A leading artist of her generation, Avery Singer (b. 1987, NYC) 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.

In the exhibition, Avery Singer: Unity Bachelor, 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 softwares 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.

As a child, Singer was into coding, chess, math, and reading. She started coding her own websites when she was eight and loved science kits. Her parents both worked as film projectionists and named her after the painter Milton Avery. Singer graduated college from The Cooper Union 2010.

“I feel incredibly free when I have an art idea. Being an artist is almost like a pursuit of this feeling of freedom. I love that feeling. I live for that.”