Gina Beavers Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1974 -

American artist Gina Beavers (b.1974, Athens) lives and works in New Jersey.

In her work, she transforms images scavenged from social media and the internet into thickly layered acrylic compositions. Exploring the themes of self-image and consumerism, Beavers’ paintings are a whimsical yet uncanny meditation on our online existence.

Beavers earned a degree in Art and Anthropology from the University of Virginia and an anthropological curiosity is evident in her observation of social media. Drawing upon online trends and fetishes, such as ‘food porn’ and bodybuilders’ selfies, or makeup tutorials on Pinterest, her paintings transfer flat-screen images into bulging textural paintings with a physical, sculptural presence, akin to Claes Oldenburg’s deflated realism.

A rainbow-coloured creamy ice-cream cone, slabs of raw meat, heavily made-up lips and eyes are among Beavers’ repertoire of subjects, each endowed with a hefty tactility, with multiple layers of acrylic painted over a foam mould, the surface detail then sculpted by the artist. In monumentalising these found images from an identifiably American consumer culture, her works become both a resistance to the ephemerality of social media and a profound questioning of its projection of promised perfection through consumption and transformation.