Avery Singer. run_it_back.exeˇ
Image © Avery Singer. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Inaugurating the 2025 programme at the Serralves Museum, the New York-based artist Avery Singer will present all new paintings and an architectural intervention in the exhibition run_it_back.exeˇ. This artist’s first solo institutional presentation in Portugal, grapples with the paradoxes of the digital era and the systematic tensions at the heart of contemporary society, exploring the confluences of art, technology and architecture.
The exhibition’s title takes its cue from the virtual realm, characterized by the idea of obsessive repetition, in which we scroll our feeds, analyze markets through our screens or repeatedly click in the illusory pursuit of control and instant gratification. In her new paintings, Singer reflects upon the promises of emerging digital economies, such as cryptocurrency, revealing the volatile, alienating fragmentation of identity that frequently coexists alongside. Figures with deliberately blank or detached expressions inhabit spaces which remind the viewer of sterile public offices and financial institutions—impersonal environments where individuals become cogs in an indifferent system.
The exhibition extends as far as the museum lobby, engaging with the architecture of Álvaro Siza in ways which transforms Serralves into a hybrid landscape. Singer’s architectural intervention will emulate the corporate environments seen in her painterly worlds. Here, art and architecture meet to blur the boundaries between the real and the virtual, underlying the instability of structures which uphold our reality—be they physical, social or technological—while challenging visitors to reflect on the contemporary world’s contradictions.
Avery Singer has emerged as one of the most exceptional painters working today, whose work explores the possibilities in the convergence of painting and technology. Her pioneering techniques are deployed to question the ways in which images and their distribution in our contemporary world are increasingly informed by new media and technologies. run_it_back.exeˇ is more than an exhibition; it is an urgent call for reflection on the societal transformations defining our future.
The exhibition is organized by the Fundação de Serralves — Museum
of Contemporary Art, curated by Inês Grosso, Chief Curator of Serralves
Museum, and coordinated by curator Filipa Loureiro.
Architectural project:
DepA architects, Porto.
The exhibition was supported by Lizzy and Ramtin Naimi and Hauser & Wirth Gallery.