Gretchen Andrew

Gretchen Andrew (born 1988) is an American artist. She is known for fusing different mediums (such as photography and painting) with advanced technology. Her painting practice is mostly described as an exploration of portraiture, search engine art and virtual reality. Her work is known for making the invisible impacts of technology visible.

Her work is exhibited in museums and galleries in Europe and the United States, including The Monterey Museum of Art, Hope 93, De Re Gallery,

In her series Facetune Portraits, she uses oil paintings to confront the rise of AI-generated beauty standards and their impact on self-perception in the digital age. This series won the 21C Acquisition Award at the Untitled Miami in 2024. Describing her degree she has said, "Information systems is all about how companies use technology for competitive advantage...translated into art, I'm asking how I can use information to create meaning."

Andrew worked in Silicon Valley at both Intuit and Google. After working there from 2010 to 2012, she left Google to become a painter.

In 2020 she moved to Park City, Utah.

Work Search Engine Art (2018 - 2023)

From 2018 - 2023 Gretchen Andrew's paintings explored and manipulated the functioning of ad technology such as search engines, particularly Google Search.

In 2018 Gretchen's work then focused on the political and social impact of search technology, exploring in a paper with The British Computer Society the implications for artificial intelligence. Her paintings and search engine art are said to relate to the art world in an aspirational way.

Facetune Portraits (2024 - present) Introduced in September 2024 at Berlin Art Week, Facetune Portraits is a limited series of unique oil paintings made using AI, algorithms and robotics to address questions about who humans are in relationship to who technology tells them they should be. Martin Robinson of The Standard called the result, "chilling and poignant work."

Gretchen Andrew's Facetune Portraits Universal Beauty series is described as a searing critique of the global standardization of beauty where the artist both utilizes and interrogates technology, serving as a meditation on the medium itself. The works are created by taking images of contestants from Miss Universe and applying popular apps such as Facetune and Body Tune to “enhance” the image using AI. The artist then uses an oil paint printer developed by Matr Labs to produce the unmodified image in oil paint. While still wet the painting is put through an XY-axis drawing robot that is instructed by the discrepancies between the original image and an AI-modified (facetuned) version. The robot adds brushstrokes where lines have changed thus visually highlighting the AI’s alterations. The artist has cited Frank Auerbach and Alberto Giacometti, who depict multiple perspectives, as inspiration for the visual, painterly nature of the resulting work.