The Artist Who Scours Instagram and the Internet

As evidenced by Gina Beavers’s emphatically physical paintings, which open at MOMA PS1 on March 31st, new technologies make the world’s oldest medium stronger.
Courtesy the artist and GNYP Gallery photograph by Charles Benton
Courtesy the artist and GNYP Gallery; photograph by Charles Benton

Around 1840, the French realist Paul Delaroche saw a daguerreotype and declared that painting was dead. But new technologies just keep making the world’s oldest medium stronger. The American artist Gina Beavers scours Instagram and the Internet for images to use in her emphatically physical work, whose ultimate subject is painting itself. “Corn Nails” (above, from 2019) conjures both #foodporn and the flamboyant still-lifes of the Flemish baroque. “Gina Beavers: The Life I Deserve” opens at MOMA PS1 on March 31.