Petra Cortright

Petra Cortright first gained attention for webcam self-portrait videos altered by animated gifs that she would post to her YouTube account and caption with spam text. In recent years, she has expanded her practice to include works in painting, sculpture, film, and video. In Cortright’s hands, painting opens up expansive and seemingly limitless layers of information found while surfing on the internet. She has referred to her painting process as “breaking down photography,” often creating up to hundreds of layers before printing the result to canvas or high gloss paper. Google Images, Bing, and Pinterest, with its array of dream interiors, have proven to be rich repositories of material for the artist. She is less concerned with the content of the images than the colors, surfaces, and textures that she finds there, which she wields as digitally sourced “paints” to create her complex and ebullient compositions. Cortright’s luminous renderings recall the celestial hues of classical Impressionist painting as much as the ambient glow of the computer screen. Emphasized by an arsenal of digital brushstrokes, they confound our perception of the digital-analog divide. Petra Cortright (b. 1986, Santa Barbara) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work was included in a group exhibition at The High Line Channel, New York, organized in collaboration with Chanel Culture Fund. Other recent exhibitions include Paper-Thin Wood Veil Wide Range Hop Suisse! at Zeughaus Teufen, Switzerland; Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and her large-scale video installation sapphire cinnamon viper fairy , presented as part of Art Basel Unlimited 2025. Petra Cortright has had solo exhibitions at Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs; Art Basel Parcours, Basel; 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 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. Petra Cortright is part of a number of public collections including Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College, Claremont; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Booth Business School Collection, University of Chicago, Chicago; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kadist Foundation, Paris, San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of the Image, Breda, in collaboration with Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs; Péréz Art Museum, Miami; Rhizome Net Art Anthology, New York; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara; The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach; among others.