WINTER SUNLIGHT CASTLE WINDOW

Petra Cortright

March 27 - April 10, 2024

sweet and sour spareribs_spells and rituals SHARON STONE PICS, 2024

Digital painting on anodized aluminum

80 x 59 in (203.2 x 149.9 cm)

available Petra Cortright works

COUNTY is pleased to present WINTER SUNLIGHT CASTLE WINDOW by Petra Cortright, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Cortright’s new series combines two of her great loves—flowers and the sea—in some of her most aesthetically pristine and philosophically engaging works to date. Front and center in each composition is a single flower which Cortright plucks from her “mother file”—the vast archive of Internet-appropriated images she has been collecting over the years. The flowers, which range from water-lilies to desert plants such as aloe, come from many different regions, biomes, and seasons. They float on hazy backgrounds that read as abstracted seascapes, which she creates by layering together hundreds of semi-transparent washes of digital brush effects and colored gradients. Cortright calls these background layers “veils.” Whether we think of Salome’s seductive Dance of the Seven Veils or the concept in Gnostic mysticism that the true nature of the physical universe is veiled from us by layers of illusion, Cortright’s veils suggest a universe of magical appearances where nothing that meets the eye can ever fully be trusted.

Metaphysical questions abound in Cortright’s art, which perennially tests the boundaries between the virtual and the real while puncturing the veils of painterly illusion. WINTER SUNLIGHT CASTLE WINDOW takes these metaphysical investigations a step further. By floating each flower mid-air above a numinous background, the new works reference a vast corpus of sacred and mythological paintings. Dry desert plants appear to be born miraculously from the sea, like the titular goddess in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Other flowers float heavenward on rays of light that seem to stream down from unseen windows in the sky, recalling the many depictions of the Ascension in Renaissance art. Just as Surrealists like Dalí used Renaissance illusionism to create their own dreamlike fantasies, Cortright creates similarly fantastical landscapes using twenty-first century tools. The light sources in these works are intentionally contradictory, representing a combination of drop shadows, stock images, and other digital pre-sets and effects. Her celestial rays of “castle window” light do not change the illumination of the flowers in the foreground, and her trompe-l’oeil drop shadows affirm the flatness of the picture plane. This is a universe of surfaces without physical substance, dimension, or what Heidegger called “the thingness of things.” Yet within Cortright’s virtual universe, there is still great beauty—greater perhaps than that of our ordinary world, since it is not subject to the effects of gravity or time. “Art does not

have to obey the laws of physics,” Cortright says. And the works in WINTER SUNLIGHT CASTLE WINDOW are gloriously disobedient, basking in a transcendent beauty beyond the material plane.

Petra Cortright (b. 1986, Santa Barbara) lives and works in Los Angeles. She recently presented a large-scale video installation on the Münsterplatz at the 2023 edition of Art Basel Parcours. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Palm Springs Art Museum; Doota Plaza, Seoul; LIMA, Amsterdam; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles; University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh; and Depart Foundation, Los Angeles. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions at international venues including the MoMA New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; KM – Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Kunsthaus Langenthal, Langenthal; New Museum, New York; 12th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon; and SJ01 Biennial, San Jose.

Logan R. Beitmen