Petra Cortright

Petra Cortright (b. 1986, USA) is a post-internet artist who was welcomed into the galleries of the art world with open arms. Cortright became famous in 2007 when she published self-portrait YouTube videos filmed with her webcam. Today Cortright’s art also encompasses large-scale paintings, which she creates in Photoshop. ”It’s about bringing digital things into a physical space”, she says. The pictures in her paintings are reworked abstract and figurative images, with Pinterest as a great source of inspiration. She especially uses “flowers, beautiful kitchens and beach scenes”, which are combined with her own digital paintings. The files are modified in hundreds of layers and she calls the original file the “mother file”. The finished painting is then printed on fine linen canvas, aluminium, paper or silk. The titles of the works reflect the file names and different file types, as well as ordinary Internet search terms.

The art site Artsy has called Cortright the Monet of the 21st century: an apt description of Cortright’s digital landscape paintings. Trained at the Parsons School of Design in New York and at the California College of Arts in San Francisco, she has always had a close relationship with the Internet and computers. Cortright is an artist much sought-after for museum exhibitions and has so far exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, among others. In 2013 she was selected to participate in the Frieze Art Fair’s film project Frieze Film. Cortright is also Stella McCartney’s muse and they have worked together on many occasions.

Cortright’s art can be found in the collections of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Péréz Museum in Miami and MOCA in Los Angeles, and many more besides.