Avery Singer

Avery Singer was born in 1987 in New York City to artist parents, Janet Kusmierski and Greg Singer, who encouraged her early interest in photography, film, and drawing. She studied abroad in 2008 at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt am Main and received her BFA from Cooper Union in New York in 2010, where her coursework ranged across performance, video, carpentry, metal casting, and welding rather than painting. Shortly after graduating she began experimenting with Google SketchUp, a 3D modeling program built for exhibition design, and developed her signature technique: building compositions digitally, then airbrushing them by hand onto canvas in grayscale, a process that obscures the physical labor behind an image that looks machine-made.

Her work draws heavily on early twentieth-century movements including Constructivism, Futurism, and Cubism, filtered through a blocky, computer-generated figuration and a running interest in humor and absurdism directed at art-world tropes such as artistic bravado and self-mythology. In 2013 she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and held her first solo exhibition that year at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Berlin, titled The Artists, which parodied those same tropes. Her first European solo museum presentation followed in 2014 at Kunsthalle Zurich, curated by Beatrix Ruf, which traveled to the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. In 2018 she began incorporating an industrial paint-spraying robot into her process. Her first self-portrait, Self Portrait (Summer 2018), was included in the central pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 alongside work by George Condo and Anthea Hamilton. In 2020 she signed with Hauser & Wirth, becoming, at the time, the youngest artist represented by the gallery. She continues to live and work in New York City.

Critics consistently frame Singer's work around the friction between digital process and painterly tradition: compositions generated on a computer, then executed by hand in an airbrushed grayscale palette that mimics the look of an architectural rendering or an early photograph. Writers have connected her blocky, faceted figuration to Cubism and Constructivism directly, treating her as an artist using historical painting movements as raw material for a distinctly contemporary, technology-mediated practice. Her recurring self-portraiture and satirical treatment of art-world postures, ambition, inebriation, and self-regard among them, have been read as a knowing commentary on the mythology of the artist from inside a body of work that itself depends on industrial tools. Institutional recognition arrived quickly and consistently: a European museum debut within a year of her first gallery show, a Venice Biennale inclusion by her early thirties, and representation by one of the largest commercial galleries in the world by 2020, a trajectory critics have cited as evidence of unusually fast critical consensus around a single, well-defined idea.

Singer's auction high is Happening (2014), a 100-by-120-inch canvas that sold for 5,250,000 dollars at Sotheby's New York on May 19, 2022, beating her prior record by roughly 760,000 dollars, a 16 percent increase, and beating the painting's own mid-estimate by 75 percent. At the time of the sale it was the second-highest auction price ever recorded for an artist under 35, behind only Raqib Shaw. Her auction supply remains comparatively small, consistent with a young, actively working painter whose gallery controls the pace at which new work reaches the market.

Singer's market moved quickly from gallery sales to significant auction prices, and her most notable auction results cluster in a short window beginning in 2021, which means there is limited long-run price history to judge how the market performs across a full cycle. No catalogue raisonne exists, and verification runs through her studio and her gallery, Hauser & Wirth, which also controls primary-market supply. Collectors should treat her auction record as a signal of strong current demand from a specific ultra-contemporary buyer base rather than as evidence of a long-established trading pattern.