Petra Cortright, installation view, Predator Swamping
Petra Cortright
Predator Swamping
13 February - 27 March 2021
In order to maintain survival, some species hatch all at once. Floods of nascent turtles, crabs, or fish will overwhelm their predator by sheer volume. This oversaturation ensures that the breed will live on. For Predator Swamping, Petra Cortright exhibits a new body of work, made during the precarious months of 2020, in which she exercises a similar survival instinct.
For her third exhibition with the gallery and her first since the birth of her son, Cortright continues to create paintings in Photoshop and prints them on Belgian linen. The paintings incorporate images of the High Desert, Bolivia, and Patagonia sourced from the internet which function as a base layer upon which she builds expanded landscapes. For the first time in her career Cortright has also created paintings in black and white. The stripping away of color reveals an overwhelming desolation that could bear a strong resemblance to 2020, while for some including Cortright, a homebody at heart, the imagery evokes doomsday bliss.
Petra Cortright was born in Santa Barbara in 1986 and lives in Los Angeles where she has been making works in video, painting, and sculpture for over a decade. She studied Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, NY and the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. Solo exhibitions include City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand (2017); Depart Foundation, Los Angeles (2015). Selected group exhibitions include “The Body Electric,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019); “I Was Raised On the Internet,” MCA Chicago (2018); The Metabolic Age, MALBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina; "On YouTube. Kunst und Playlists aus 10 Jahren,“ Kunsthaus Langenthal, Switzerland; "Im Inneren der Stadt," Künstlerhaus Bremen, Germany; Ural Industrial Biennial, Ekaterinberg, Russia (all 2017); "Electronic Superhighway,” Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2016); 12th Bienniale de Lyon, France (2013); New Wave, The Internet Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennial (2009). Cortright’s works are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Péréz Museum, Miami; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MOTI, Breda, in collaboration with Stedelijk Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Kadist Foundation, Paris, San Francisco; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Recent publications include Petra Cortright published by SKIRA and E-Girl published by Hesse Press.
