Gina Beavers

Gina Beavers, Applebees!, acrylic on canvas, 20" x 16" x 3", 2012.

Gina Beavers (born 1974) is an American artist based in the New York area. 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. 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, Nassau County Museum of Art and KMAC Contemporary Art Museum. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Whitney Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, among others. She lives and works in Orange, New Jersey.

Early life and career Beavers was born in 1974 in Athens, Greece into a diplomatic family and grew up moving between Europe and the US. She attended the University of Virginia and received a BA in studio art and anthropology in 1996. She initially painted in a cartoonish, narrative vein, but turned to hard-edge abstraction in graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned an MFA in painting and drawing in 2000. and solo exhibitions at James Fuentes Gallery and Clifton Benevento in New York, among others. Her inclusion in the 2015 MoMA PS1 "Greater New York" show increased this level of public recognition. GNYP Gallery (Berlin), Carl Kostyál Gallery (London and Stockholm), and Marianne Boesky Gallery (New York), and Neuer Essener Kunstverein (Germany). She has also appeared in group exhibitions at the FLAG Art Foundation, Gavin Brown's Enterprise and Frans Hals Museum, among others.

Gina Beavers, Doll Lips, acrylic on linen on panel, 48" x 48" x 9", 2021. Beavers bases her paintings on snapshots from social media subgenres that embody contemporary modes of consumption and desire defined by excess and differentiation: "food porn," makeup tutorials, body painting and bodybuilder selfies. In a similar way, Beaver's painting technique calls into question (mostly male) painting traditions, even as it invokes them. She uses acrylic paint—associated with modern flatness and matte texture as opposed to oil's richness— and paints in an intentionally clumsy manner with thick, relief-like protrusions that rejects both mastery and illusionistic depth. 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. The drawings focused on grids of lipstick tutorials and nail and food images, such as the humorous Hot Dog Nails Drawing (2022), which portrayed a hand with hot dog-decorated fingernails.