AVERY SINGER: WAR_OVERLAYS
HAUSER & WIRTH presents an exhibition by Avery Singer, who, for Zurich Art Weekend 2026, is showcasing new paintings and a site-specific architectural intervention.
June 12 – September 5, 2026
The intervention transforms the gallery's top floor in Zurich into a space reminiscent of a casino: an environment charged with tension, shaped by surveillance. Incorporating AI-based tools into her painting process for the first time, "War_overlays" examines how ever-evolving media and technologies shape our consciousness, destabilizing the boundaries between perception and reality. Following Singer's work addressing her personal memories of 9/11, the new paintings reflect on the artist's experience growing up amid televised conflicts in the early 2000s, using distorted, AI-influenced imagery to evoke the media violence of the era.
Influenced by Jean Baudrillard’s writings on the Gulf War, the exhibition considers how conflict in the West is primarily experienced as a media spectacle, constructed and interpreted through images rather than direct encounters. This dissonance is heightened by the apparent incongruity between the casino setting—with its long red curtains, tiled carpet, and staged CCTV cameras—and the unsettling content of Singer’s paintings.
Throughout the exhibition, Singer’s poker player motif recurs as a central figure: a representation of the artist managing risk by interpreting patterns, anticipating outcomes, and perceiving what others overlook. This figure is superimposed on a mosaic of AI-influenced images, drawn from contemporary warfare, highlighting the harsh realities that persist beyond the studio—or the casino—but are easily ignored in everyday life.
Singer’s use of AI to develop the prompts and keywords that initiate aspects of the image-generation process further entails themes such as memory, truth, and knowledge, underscoring the paradoxes of the digital age. The resulting images are characterized by what Singer calls a “sloppy AI aesthetic,” revealing strange distortions that highlight the limitations of algorithmic systems (for example, in the work “Solver” (2026), a U.S. Marine is depicted wearing a kufiya).
Initially working in ComfyUI, the artist develops custom LoRA models, trained on individuals, to create a base character. These subjects are further refined before becoming the central figure of the painting. The images arranged in a mosaic on the surface are derived from training AI models to combine specific images with the sloppy AI aesthetic: war fetishization, LAN parties, and other aspects of real-world digital culture, along with semi-autobiographical themes.
As Singer says of the final result: "I thought it would be interesting for viewers to be able to look at the paintings and recognize a malfunctioning AI system. Perhaps there is poetry in the failure of such advanced technology."