Gina Beavers
[1] She first gained attention in the early 2010s for thickly painted, relief-like acrylic images of food, cosmetics techniques and bodybuilders appropriated from Instagram snapshots and selfies found using hashtags such as #foodporn, #sixpack and #makeuptutorial.
[4][5][6][7] In 2019, New York Times critic Martha Schwendener described her paintings as "canny statements on contemporary bodies, beauty and culture … [that] tackle the weirdness of immaterial images floating through the ether, building them up into something monumental, rather than dismissing them.
[2][33][5] Critics connect this emphasis on materiality and the body to painterly, carnal traditions of oil painting extending back to artists such as Goya and Titian, as well as to more unruly, embodied aspects of Pop art.
[22][2][1] She recreated them as jarring, close-up reliefs of grotesquely muscled male torsos, bulging female breasts and bodies covered with images of animals or art-historical motifs (Gator or Mondrian, both 2012) that Andrew Russeth characterized as "meaty paintings with pleasantly creepy volume.
[21][2] New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote that Beavers "exaggerated and satirized both the act of painting and the fetishization of food by professional photographers and hungry diners … captur[ing] certain extremes of indulgence that verge on gross.
[6][7][2] Los Angeles Times critic Sharon Mizota suggested that the thickly built, sticky accretions undid the gloss and sense of effortless glamour of their digital sources, operating "somewhere between critique and affection" and aesthetic and didactic objects to "cinematic and thoroughly surreal" effect.
[7] Artforum described them as "less pictorial than topographic" nature morte objects that positioned "paint's materiality as a metonym for that of the body's, making the latter seem cadaverous by comparison," as in Crotch Shots from the Getty Villa (2014), a five-part grid of Greco-Roman genitalia snapped from museum statuary.
The exhibition "Ambitchous" (2017) juxtaposed makeup tutorial images with carnivalesque instructions for dressing up as cartoon characters such as Cruella de Vil and Elsa from the film Frozen (2013); reviews noted in the work and show's portmanteau title a contemporary attitude positioned ambiguously between female self-affirmation and ruthlessness.
[5] In subsequent shows, such as "World War Me" (2020), Beavers examined identity and the ubiquitous presence of the female face and body in art and advertising through the lens of a fractured social-media self-consciousness craving recognition and popularity.
[15][4][37] Her boldly painted reliefs depicted enlarged, often repeating features (lips, hands, fake nails), faces and torsos in bikini underwear flaunting art-historical (Van Gogh, Picasso, Mondrian and others) and consumer culture motifs.
