Gina Beavers
Florid
07.09 > 14.10.2023
Livourne 35

In Florid, the first solo exhibition by painter Gina Beavers at rodolphe janssen, the artist wields her own language of flowers as gleaned from a contemporary reinterpretation of their historical precedents. Representations from art history, from landscape and still life to Delft pottery, become repurposed through composite abstractions produced by artificially generated algorithms. Their palettes are familiar, their compositions feel legibly referential yet equally non-specific. Rendered in uninhibited relief of oil over acrylic, these paintings cast real shadows and provide real depth.

About the artist :

Gina Beavers (b. 1974 in Athens, Greece. Lives and works in The Oranges, NJ USA)

Gina Beavers 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. Her later work has continued to recombine these recurrent subjects, as well as explore memes, irreverent conflations of genres or art history and kitsch, identity, fandom and celebrity-worship. 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.”

Beavers has exhibited at institutions including MoMA PS1, New York, NY USA, Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen, Germany; the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands, Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, NY USA; and KMAC Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville, KY USA; and the Schlossmuseum Linz, Austria, among others.