Solos is excited to present Petra Cortright’s blueberry cell phone silk celadon popcorn drift at this year ’s Art Basel Hong Kong - a series of nine paintings and nine corresponding NFTs. Built in Photoshop from layers of brushstroke-like textures, digital effects, and images sourced online, each painting has a sister NFT that shares its imagery but exists as a distinct artwork in a different medium. Together they extend Cortright’s ongoing exploration of how images move between digital and physical forms.
Cortright first gained attention in the late 2000s when artists began using YouTube as an exhibition platform. Her 2007 video vv ebcam, in which she cycles through built-in webcam effects, circulated widely before being removed by YouTube in 2011. The work later entered MoMA’s permanent collection. Cortright has exhibited at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; MCA Chicago; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Frieze Film, London; the 12th Biennale de Lyon; and the Venice Biennale. Her work is held in the collections of Pérez Art Museum Miami, LACMA , the Hammer Museum, Moderna Museet, MCA Chicago, San José Museum of Art, MOCA Los Angeles, and Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology, among others.
Her emergence as an artist is inseparable from a specific cultural moment. In the early 2000s, before the art market had any framework for online work, a loose international community of artists began posting directly to the web - not as documentation of work made elsewhere, but as the work itself. These were the Surf Clubs: collaborative blogs and online collectives where artists including Rafaël Rozendaal, Harm van den Dorpel, Travess Smalley, Cory Arcangel, and Oliver Laric shared images, videos, and experiments in real time, with no gallery infrastructure and no commercial logic. It was a community that formed around permanent online presence, built on mutual attention and a shared conviction that the network was a legitimate place to make art. Cortright was central to that world.
Bio
Petra Cortright’s core practice is the creation and distribution of digital and physical images using consumer or corporate software. She became renowned for making self-portrait videos that use her computer’s webcam and default effects tools, which she would then upload to YouTube and caption with spam text. Cortright’s paintings on aluminum, linen, paper, or acrylic are created in Photoshop...