Petra Cortright's digital landscapes blossom at Intersect Aspen

One of the fair's only solo stands, from Florida-based gallery County, features recent compositions by the Net art pioneer

Benjamin Sutton

1 August 2023

“We chose to exhibit a solo presentation because we felt the strength of Petra’s landscape works garnered a more in-depth viewing,” says Dalton Freed, the director of County.

Petra Cortright: sapphire cinnamon viper fairy

September 29, 2022 – March 26, 2023

Petra Cortright makes art in traditional genres, such as landscape and portraiture, using tools, sources, formats, and platforms native to the age of the internet and digital technology.

June Exhibitions at No.9 Cork Street

Opening on 2 June until 18 June 2022, Frieze's Mayfair gallery presents exhibitions by Vadehra Art Gallery (New Delhi), Hymodernity (Digital Platform) and Athr Gallery (Jeddah)

IN FRIEZE | 23 MAY 22

Canon! looks to disrupt the established biases of art, redefining our conceptions of what art might be in the burgeoning age of digital art and accelerated technological development. The group exhibition presents works which explore the possibilities of an ‘evolutionary now’. The artists selected for Canon! were chosen by Hymodernity to reflect the digital art platform’s diverse community, as a celebration of the breadth of artistic creativity and identities. Artists include Petra Cortright, 4FSB, Masha Batsii, Samuel Lubicz and WRLD.SPACE, amongst others. 

For #EarthDay, “Hellscape No 17” by artist @petra_cortright has been installed at the Cantor Arts Center (@cantorarts) and the @hammer_museum as part of #ACoolMillionCampaign, a public arts initiative for climate awareness led by artists and institutions to expand environmental justice programming and support the conservation of one million acres of land.

PETRA CORTRIGHT

Petra Cortright on self-isolation, Zoom mania, and her early webcam works

April 20, 2020

Giampaolo Bianconi

I FEEL LIKE I’VE STEPPED INTO A TIME MACHINE and been transported back to ten or twelve years ago. Being at the computer and online was a big part of my life and work back then. There was this certain consciousness that I wanted to record—the spirit of AOL Instant Messenger chatrooms.

‘I’m a Defender of Beauty and Simplicity’: Petra Cortright on Why She Has No Interest in Jumping on the Political Art Bandwagon

The celebrated net artist talks about the changing internet landscape, and why she doesn't mix painting and politics.

Kate Brown, February 2, 2022

In the early 2010s, Cortright became known among a cohort of millennial digital post-internet artists for her short statement video works that innovated and confounded the notion of selfies and other forms of self-presentation online. And her work continues to find relevance today

By William S. Smith

Published in issue: Jan/Feb 2021

The concept of layers is essential to understanding Petra Cortright's work. The intricate digital paintings she has created over the past decade take advantage of the powerful "layer" function at the heart of Photoshop. Every digital mark and brushstroke she makes using the image-editing software can be isolated and manipulated in its own slice of virtual space before being flattened and printed on canvas. But what if, instead of flattening these layers, they could be expanded in three dimensions? 

VVEBCAM received lots of search hits, and some people expressed their anger at its misleading descriptors in the comments section below it. Cortright, in turn, robustly answered her critics in the spirit of the Internet burn. Her spammy keywords led to the video’s eventual pulling from YouTube in 2010.

Cortright’s video and the swirling interactivity around it made VVEBCAM one of the first social media artworks, and it remains one of the most influential. It engaged with a highly volatile, anonymous digital populace, one that has become a dominant force in today’s socio-political landscape.

Petra Cortright (Born 1986, Santa Barbara, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She studied Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, NY (2008) and the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2004). 

At 31, Cortright is young for a survey (“Too young,” she told Vice in February), but she’s long been recognized as a pioneer in the field of what’s often called post-internet art, meaning work that deals, tangentially or directly, with the web. Her paintings—meticulously layered Photoshop files that incorporate images she finds online (roses, kitchens, beach scenes) with digital drawings (flowers, squiggles) printed on aluminum, silk, or flags—prompted the website Artsy to declare Cortright “the Monet of the 21st Century.” 

A painter reminiscent of Helen Frankenthaler, Cortright dilutes her original digital medium to create images that almost seem to glow, that create a space of their own. Printed on linen, aluminum and paper, the labor of Cortright’s research process is hidden by the lightness and deftness of her mark-making.