Petra Cortright

Petra Cortright (b. 1986, Santa Barbara) lives and works in Los Angeles. She first gained attention for webcam self-portrait videos altered by animated gifs that she would post to her YouTube account and caption with spam text. In recent years, she has expanded her practice to include works in painting, sculpture, film, and video. In Cortright’s hands, painting opens up expansive and seemingly limitless layers of information found while surfing on the internet. She has referred to her painting process as “breaking down photography,” often creating up to hundreds of layers before printing the result to canvas or high gloss paper. Google Images, Bing, and Pinterest, with its array of dream interiors, have proven to be rich repositories of material for the artist. She is less concerned with the content of the images than the colors, surfaces, and textures that she finds there, which she wields as digitally sourced “paints” to create her complex and ebullient compositions. Cortright’s luminous renderings recall the celestial hues of classical impressionist painting as much as the ambient glow of the computer screen. Emphasised by an arsenal of digital brushstrokes, they confound our perception of the digital-analog divide. ...

Société is a Berlin-based gallery with an international profile—its core operations lay in Europe, the United States, and Asia. The gallery’s exhibitions, publications, and boundary-pushing initiatives have established a vital dialogue among artists working internationally. Société focuses on establishing long-term, symbiotic relationships with its gallery artists, many of whom had their first solo exhibition with the gallery. The structure of the gallery’s program and the format of its projects is an artist-led approach that responds to the ever-evolving conditions of artistic research and production—at times even pushing beyond traditional exhibition formats. Although differing in media and approach, Société’s artists address the relationship between cultural production and consumption, the circulation of information, identity, and cultural history in an era highly mediated by technology. The gallery's publishing initiative Edition Société, has worked with accomplished graphic designers on a number of acclaimed artist's books. The gallery has additionally produced 12" records with several contemporary musicians. Société has exhibited at Art Basel / Art Basel Miami Beach / Art Basel Hong Kong / Frieze London / Frieze New York / Frieze LA / ARCO Madrid / Independent New York / Independent Brussels / Art Cologne / Art Brussels / Enter Art Fair / Gallery Weekend Berlin / and Art Berlin among other locations. ...