In a room transformed into a space reminiscent of a casino, between red curtains and fake surveillance cameras, the American artist presents paintings that, for the first time, allow artificial intelligence to interfere in the creative process, in order to better question what seeing still means..
Avery Singer, Daniela, 2026, Acrylic on canvas stretched over aluminum panel, 241.9 x 216.5 x 5.3 cm
Avery Singer has always painted at the boundary between reality and its technical reconstruction. Nourished by preparatory drawings created using 3D modeling, her compositions are executed in acrylic with an airbrush, blurring the lines between digital image and pictorial creation. This method has made her one of the most singular voices in contemporary American painting, an artist who conceives of the surface as one conceives of an interface. With the exhibition "War_overlays," presented at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse, during Zurich Art Weekend, she crosses a new threshold: that of artificial intelligence, invoked for the first time in the very creation of the images.
The installation is striking even before the eye meets the canvases. The artist has conceived a site-specific architectural intervention that transforms the gallery's upper floor, giving it the air of a casino: patterned carpeting, long crimson curtains, and CCTV cameras positioned like silent sentinels. This decor is not merely a scenographic embellishment: it immediately immerses the visitor in an atmosphere of surveillance and calculated risk, a place where every gesture seems observed and every expression deciphered.
In this environment, one figure recurs like an obsessive motif: the poker player. Singer sees in him a double of herself and, more broadly, of the artist: someone who reads patterns, anticipates outcomes, and perceives what others miss. Poker, a solitary sport par excellence, exposes the player to constant scrutiny and evaluation, a tension the artist likens to the very act of creation. Superimposed on these figures of players is a mosaic of AI-generated images, drawn from the iconography of contemporary conflicts, which serves as a reminder that beyond the game and the studio lies a harsher reality, too often kept at bay by the comforts of everyday life.
These new canvases extend a work of remembrance begun by the artist around 9/11, and this time focus on the experience of a childhood lived to the rhythm of televised war images in the early 2000s. Singer explores how this early and continuous exposure to mediated conflicts shaped a perception of the world where the event exists almost exclusively as an image, recomposed, disseminated, and repeated to the point of abstraction. The reference to Jean Baudrillard's thought on the Gulf War surfaces without ever imposing itself as discourse: it infuses a pictorial reflection on the distance that separates lived experience from its representation, on that moment when reality is entirely contained within the image that purports to depict it.
The fabrication process deserves close attention, as it becomes an integral part of the work's meaning. Singer begins by working in ComfyUI, where she develops custom LoRa models, trained on real individuals to generate basic characters, which are then refined until they become the central figure of the painting. The mosaic texture covering the surfaces arises from training AI models to blend several layers of images: warrior fetishization, LAN parties, fragments of digital culture, and semi-autobiographical material. Between each layer of paint, the artist applies liquid rubber by hand, in a haphazard manner, to inscribe the trace of the gesture and remind us that the object before us remains a painting, and not a print or a digitally produced object.
The result is images marked by what Singer herself calls an " AI slop aesthetic ," in other words, an aesthetic of AI's imprecision, revealing strange distortions that underscore the limitations of algorithmic systems. For example, in Solver (2026), a US Marine appears wearing a keffiyeh: a lopsided, almost absurd image produced by artificial intelligence without understanding its implications. This failure becomes a poetic territory for the artist: she likes the viewer to be able to recognize in the painting the precise moment when the machine begins to falter, as if a form of truth paradoxically emerges from this malfunction.
"War_overlays" therefore does not seek to judge the technology it employs, but rather to make it the very material for a meditation on memory, perception, and the construction of verisimilitude. By revisiting the figure of the player, simultaneously actor and spectator of their own game, Singer constructs an allegory of the contemporary condition in the face of images: we think we are reading the cards, but perhaps we are only falling for a bluff whose author we do not yet know.
“War_overlays”
Hauser & Wirth Zurich
Limmatstrasse 270, Zurich (Switzerland)
The 12 5 September 2026 June
