Artcity / Review from Berlin's Gallery Weekend

The Artists: Avery Singer. April 26th – June 22nd
Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler Galerie, Karl–Liebknecht–Straße 29, 4th floor

There was something about the setting of this gallery- it was behind an unmarked door down a long, spooky hallway on the fourth floor of a big office building. Generic and colorless computery updates of purist still lives, by recent Cooper Union graduate Avery Singer, look completely at home in this bizarre space. Composing her images in 3-D rendering software,  Singer uses masks on canvas and an airbrush, which creates a naturalistic effect, while clearly depicting digital forms.

Genre scenes looked strangely cleaned up, though a goofy kind of humor ran through both the situations on view and the way they were depicted. “Saturday Night” shows a starkly-lit spaghetti pile of cubes wearing an artist hat, next to a bottle wine. The gray self-seriousness mimics the drudgery of making such images. This saved the paintings from being too dry. It was nice to see the impeccable technical skill of this artist not lead to boring, technical-looking work. Instead, exacting craft provided a clean slate for the abstractions to look like they were taking place between physical objects.