Artist: Avery Singer

For Zurich Art Weekend 2026, US artist Avery Singer presents new paintings and a site-specific architectural intervention transforming the upstairs Zurich gallery into a space reminiscent of a casino—a charged environment shaped by surveillance.

Within the paintings, Singer expands upon the figure of the poker player: a protagonist that parallels the role of the artist, operating under high stakes, reading patterns, anticipating risk and perceiving what others might overlook. Moving away from animation software, Singer employs open-source and AI-based tools to select and incorporate images drawn from post-2001 contemporary warfare—using references that evoke the mediated violence of the era—to serve as building blocks of her paintings. These fragments function like overlays within a larger composition, foregrounding the harsh realities that persist beyond the studio, yet are easily neglected in the everyday. Notably, Singer’s use of AI to develop the prompts and keywords that initiate aspects of the image generation process further implicates themes of automation and control, while exploring the paradoxes of the digital era.