ARTIST GRETCHEN ANDREW
Gretchen Andrew
hacks systems of power
with art, code,
and glitter.
In Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty, Gretchen Andrew uses custom robotics to scribe popular AI-driven beauty filters from social media into oil paintings derived from pageant queens from around the world. Normally these visual modifications occur seamlessly and invisibly. By making this process visible, Facetune Portraits reveals the messy co-existence we have with our digital selves.
Made up of a potential 100 contestants from 100 different countries, the series looks at the homogenising impact of a monocultural, single AI beauty standard across the faces and bodies of famously beautiful women from around the world. As this same algorithm sculpts the female form into a single, universal look, we see diversity disappear. The result is a full-body portrait of tension, where each brush stroke, each smudge, each painterly contradiction is a record of disagreement between how our faces and bodies actually look and how AI says we should be.
These works outwardly portray the absurd, and too-real scars of the hidden 'perfections' that lurk behind so many of the images we experience, revealing our desire not just to be beautiful, but to be like everyone else, accepted as much by the algorithms as by our peers.
Put forward for acquisition by Curator of Digital Art Christiane Paul, the acquisition committee voted enthusiastically and unanimously to acquire Facetune Portrait - Universal Beauty, USA and Facetune Portrait - Universal Beauty, Puerto Rico. The works use custom robotics to physically paint popular AI-driven filters into oil paintings, revealing the tension between who we are and who algorithms say we should be.
Gretchen Andrew
Annka Kultys Gallery · London
I was just this morning reflecting on how when I was 24 I quit what I had thought would be my dream job at Google to pursue the abstract idea of having the internet make me into an artist. I had no safety net, enough money to cover my rent and ramen for three months, and absolutely no indication that I could become an artist. No artistic skills, no connections, no artwork. I am proud of that 24-year-old self.
Gretchen Andrew I love Matthew McConaughey's notion of his hero being himself in 10 years. I like this ever-moving target and focus on what we want to become. I spend a lot of time with my future self, making, through my work and my internet manipulations, the world I want first on canvas, then in code, then in Google, then in my own IRL life. Surprisingly it makes me more present and more able to celebrate where I am. I celebrate each stage of growth.
Gretchen Andrew Everything starts as a thought or a visualisation, which I guess makes me fundamentally a conceptual artist. I dream about the world, life, and career I want and then go build it, make it appear on canvas and on the internet. I am really looking forward to my exhibition with Annka Kultys called Other Forms of Travel, and my exhibition with Francisco Carolinum in Linz, and my residency at London's National Gallery X.
Gretchen Andrew Despite having a very public career this year has been quite interior for me. I spent most of it in Utah away from the creative community I value so dearly. I was thankful to have my family and the mountains and to be healthy. I lost multiple family members from Covid and went through the fear of many others being ill or having long-term effects. More than lockdown I have been thinking about life and death and what to do with my one life. There are always ways to become more yourself and be less afraid.
Gretchen Andrew Taylor Swift. Her evolution shows how much discredit female artists have had to put up with and has persisted through in changing how the world understands her and how the music industry works. A little less than two years ago I was at a particularly ripe state of opening in my own life and saw her play her NHP Tiny Desk Concert. I've never been musical but I saw it and thought, oh, piano looks fun, I'd like to do that. That sense of possibility had never been inside me before, and now piano is one of my favourite joys.
Gretchen Andrew We all need to change and that always starts with our own belief systems. When I set the very intentional goal about how I wanted to engage with the art world I realised I had all these limiting beliefs about myself and the world I ostensibly wanted to be part of. I held beliefs like, gallerists are dishonest people with high cost structures that cannot be trusted, or, major collectors won't ever understand or appreciate my work. I picked apart each one of these and went hunting for what I wanted, not what I feared existed. Now I work with an ever-growing team of wonderful gallerists, collectors, curators, and dealers.
"I'm firm on my vision of my career being a rustic dinner table with great food and wine where everyone is and wants to be with each other for hours."
If Gretchen Andrew hacks the internet to build the world she wants, Maxim Zhestkov builds entirely new worlds from scratch, particle by particle. His design direction work sits at the edge of what screens can show. A must-read for anyone fascinated by art, technology, and the invisible forces that shape our perception.
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