Gina Beavers

Gina Beavers is a Greek-American contemporary artist best known for her bold sculptural paintings that are inspired by social media and the digital landscape. Drawn from images taken from Instagram, YouTube, image databases, and other online sources, her paintings capture the superficiality of social media—more specifically, the way content regarding food, makeup, and the body is curated and depicted online. “Much of what people do online is to try to create connections, to reach out and meet people or talk to people. That is what the surfaces of my painting do in a really literal way, they are reaching off the linen into the viewer’s space,” she commented about her work. Beavers was born in 1978 in Athens, Greece. She graduated from the University of Virginia in 1996 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art and Anthropology, then from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000 with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Drawing, and finally from Brooklyn College in 2005 with a Master of Science degree in Education. In her works, she examines cultural and social dialogues by exploring online personas, the identities that people curate of themselves through social media platforms. Through her work, she highlights the loss of individuality through the ubiquity of certain types of images such as perfectly shot selfies and pictures of food. By creating bas-relief paintings with the use of many thick layers of medium like acrylic and foam, she brings the 3D aspect of life back to the flatness of photographs from which her works originate. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at galleries including Michael Benevento in Los Angeles, GNYP Gallery in Berlin, and Carl Kostyal in London, as well as in group presentations in museums such as the Kentucky Museum of Contemporary Art in Louisville, the William Benton Museum of Art in Connecticut, and the Nassau County Museum of Art in New York. In 2019, she had her first solo museum exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York. Beavers currently lives and works in Newark, New Jersey.