Petra Cortright: Paper-Thin Wood Veil Wide Range Hop Suisse! →

Petra Cortright
June 21 - October 10, 2025 | Zeughaus Teufen, Switzerland

Petra Cortright looks at the Appenzellerland with a keen feeling for digital aesthetics and the courage to beauty - without ever having been there. The starting point of her new series of works is the image database of Appenzellerland Tourismus AR with more than a thousand photographs that reflect the visual self-image of a region between staging and idyll. The entrance was given to the artist on 1. June 2023. Cortright, one of the most important voices of digital painting, feeds these images into her personal archive of brushes, filters and textures. This results in projections, textile views and, for the first time, works on wood – shimmering, multi-layered compositions that are reminiscent of impressionistic landscapes but are produced purely digitally. Her works are considered a contemporary counterpart to Monet: it paints quickly, directly, with Sofiware instead of paint. What emerges is a radical view of our own - not critically, but lovingly: "For the first time, I cannot make the pictures more beautiful," said Cortright in the zoomcall, "the reality with you is already too beautiful." A plea for beauty – and for a new vision.

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Petra Cortright in Electricity for All at Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee →

Petra Cortright
May 15 - August 16, 2025 | Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee

‘Electricity for All’ at the Knoxville Museum of Art features work by contemporary artists exploring the complex relationships between technology, information, and power. Curated by KMA’s assistant curator, Kelsie Conley, the exhibition showcases work by Petra Cortright alongside pieces by Jim Campbell, Petra Cortright, Daniel Canogar, Nathan Hylden, Beryl Korot, Frederick Hammersley, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Amor Muñoz, Iván Navarro, Marilène Oliver, Mimi Ọnụọha, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, Elias Sime, Jered Sprecher & Sam van Strien.

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In Her Own Space: Petra Cortright on Art, Life, and the American West →

Petra Cortright | Verse

Petra Cortright, Bridal Shower, 2013 (video still)

A conversation between artist Petra Cortright and Leyla Fakhr, Artie Handz, Jamie Gourlay and Ivan Zhyzhkevych

“Yeah, I’ve always been super interested in it and growing up on the internet, you learn to speak in a certain way. Even like, you know, something as simple as like you said capitalization, it's more casual to speak in all lowercase, and that's what I prefer. I still write emails to this day in all lowercase. Like I refuse to give in to that level of professionalism, unless it's something to do with my son's school as I don't want to seem like a crazy person. But other than that, if it's just on me, I usually come across as the voice is different. 

All the titles of my paintings, they kind of come from these SEO lists. I don't remember a single title of a painting, not a single one, because they're really crazy. And also growing up on the internet, different websites had different acceptable ways of speaking and early YouTube was really rough. Not as rough as forums, I mean, depending on which forum, but there are levels of banter that I really appreciate and there's this kind of thing to like give someone a hard time, but like everyone knows you’re just having a laugh. So although I've had such a hard time, I think like the last decade with all the wokeness that’s creeped into everything and people getting banned for this or that, I think it's so silly. 

I've just been really interested in the way that people speak online and I've really enjoyed it. But that is what got me in trouble with the keywords that I put on the videos because there's a lot of really, really bad words in there. People accuse me of profiting off of racism and all this, but it's like, you single out and cherry pick certain things from this big list of everything, especially these words that are really supposed to provoke a reaction, but then there's other stuff in there, it’s everything. I don't know, I'm really, very interested in it. Everything in my work always has a lot to do with internet language.” — Petra Cortright

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FEMMEBIT and the New California

Petra Cortright | Right Click Save

Petra Cortright, (Still from) New Landscapes 2023, 2023. Courtesy of the artist

FEMMEBIT’s exhibition, “In Medias Res,” is our devoted missive to Los Angeles and its Southern California landscape. This exhibition negotiates the City of Angels through artistic praxes, offering an imaginative counter-dialogue to the mainstream media and iconic Hollywood culture. “In Medias Res” reflects today’s digital uprootedness from time-based narratives of Hollywood’s silver screen to invoke liminal spaces of belonging.

The artists showcased on Feral File, four of whom are interviewed here, have rigorous art practices in film, digital art, and internet culture. Among them, Petra Cortright employs consumer and corporate software to create intricate digital landscapes. Her New Landscapes 2023 explore a simulated environment with enigmatic desert vistas.

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Petra Cortright Interview -- From "VVWEBCAM" posted on YouTube to digital painting

Petra Cortright | Agency for Cultural Affairs JAPAN

By Miki Kleinstein

In 2007, contemporary artist Petra Cortright posted on YouTube in a column by Mr. Koishimiki, "Interview with Dragan Espencido of New York 'Rhizome' Internet Art Conservation Activities (Part 2)", which attracted attention. The video "VVEBCAM" became a hot topic. "VVEBCAM" is still a suggestive and important work when considering the preservation of Internet art. So she interviewed Cortright, an up-and-coming artist who creates her work and receives endless offers from museums and galleries around the world. In her first part, we will hear about her personal aspects, such as how she became an artist, her activities so far, and her experiences in Japan.

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Petra Cortright, haunted lemon hunted spirit →

Petra Cortright | Memo Review

Petra Cortright, CONNECTICUT LIGHT AND POWER cool win 98 themes +country +home +magazine, 2021, digital painting on anodised aluminium, 74.30 x 121.92cm, 1301SW. Image courtesy of the artist and 1301SW, Melbourne.

By Gemma Topliss

American Apparel tennis skirts, Lana Del Rey, washed-out digital images à la Terry Richardson, and blogging. The aesthetic markers of the first generation to grow up online are having a renaissance. As younger millennials and older zoomers lean in further to their puer aeternus tendencies and relive their teenage years, the web is awash with nostalgia for the 2010s. In 2006, around the same era, the term “post-internet” was coined by artist Maria Olsson. Post-internet described the internet slipping away from its status as a futuristic and foreign invention, instead becoming both a ubiquitous banality and ever-present spectral force.

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Petra Cortright: borderline auroa boreals

Petra Cortright

borderline auroa boreals | Team Gallery

March 5th 2020 – April 11th 2020

Petra Cortright, Installation View at Team Gallery, 2020

For her first solo exhibition at team, Petra Cortright will use the gallery’s main room to realize an ambitious installation that expands the layers of a digital landscape painting into physical space. The painting’s hundreds of layers, individual and combined, are printed on industrial translucent substrates hung at intervals throughout the space, with pathways through and along the installation that introduce new and ever-expanding opportunities for composition to emerge. Cortright’s brand of landscape is chaotic, beautiful, and volatile, marked by abstraction and populated by jagged .jpg shards and swift blossoms of painterly brushwork; working with a pace and agility the digital methods at her disposal afford, the entanglement of mark-making, color, and texture can assume an almost synesthetic effect.

Cortright operates within the vernacular of landscape painting but outside of its classical means and materials, questioning how the haptic and lyrical might be laced within consumer technology, spam-text poetry, and files chosen not in defense of the poor image but in celebration of it. Her painting software of choice is, of course, Photoshop, and her works mine the expressive and unintended potential of its transformations, effects, and malleability. 

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Massive Digital Projections by Charles Atlas & Petra Cortright Illuminate Chicago

Petra Cortright | The Art on the Mart | by Jill Sieracki

Petra Cortright, Installation View Art on theMart, 2020

While most of the noteworthy artworks in Chicago this week are tucked inside Navy Pier for Expo Chicago, the city’s annual art fair, there is one exhibition that’s hard to miss. Projected nightly on the 2.5-acre exterior of Chicago’s iconic waterfront Merchandise Mart, Art on theMART is the world’s largest public digital display and it returns for its second edition on Saturday, September 21. This year features work by esteemed video artist and film director Charles Atlas and buzzworthy young talent Petra Cortright.

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Petra Cortright: Pale Coil Cold Angel at Nahmad Projects

Petra Cortright

Pale Coil Cold Angel

Nahmad Projects

2 Cork Street, London W1S 3LB

8 June - 20 July, 2018

Nahmad Projects will present a solo exhibition by Petra Cortright, opening on 8th June 2018. The exhibition will feature works in 2D, 3D, and video. The artist will present stone sculptures for the first time in the form of three works carved from white Carrara marble, and a six-metre wide quadriptych will be the largest painting by the artist to date. A video installation is the latest in her “painting video” series. Cortright is a twenty-first century painter using contemporary tools. The Los Angeles-based artist is a celebrated member of a diffuse group known as “post internet” artists, who explore the effect of digital culture on the development of fine art. After a series of critically acclaimed webcam performances distributed on YouTube, the artist consolidated her practice by using Adobe Photoshop to make paintings using brushes and images mined from internet search engines. Her use of platforms like Pinterest subverts traditionally gender normative content such as flowers and interiors, freeing this imagery into expansive digital landscapes. The title of the show is also drawn from search terms used online. A final painting is a captured still from a master file that could be modified endlessly, so while her two-dimensional objects are static, they suggest dynamic change in reference to their source.

“I’ve tried regular painting. I hated it,” Cortright said in a 2015 interview with ARTnews. “It’s really slow and I thought it was the dumbest thing in the world. You can’t copy and paste or undo.” Adobe software can mimic physical painting: virtual brushes can carry multiple colours at once, their hairs can be sized and shaped, and even the paint can vary its wetness. Each work in the show expands our definition of painting: the video animates the artist’s process of building a master file with her invisible digital hand; the sculptures are 2D digital brushstrokes extruded into 3D shapes, which the artist transfers into marble from their virtual existence.

Petra Cortright was born in Santa Barbara in 1986 and lives and works in Los Angeles. She studied at Parsons School for Design in New York City, and the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Selected solo exhibitions include: +”venus de milo” +turtles +sounds, City Gallery, Wellington (2017); RUNNING NEO-GEO GAMES UNDER MAME, Tristian Koenig, Melbourne (2017); quack doctor violet “saltwater fish”, 1301PE, Los Angeles (2017); DIE ROSE, Société, Berlin (2016); ORANGE BLOSSOM PRINCESS FUCKING BUTTERCUP, Carl Kostyal, London (2016); Zero-Day Darling, Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco (2016).

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ProjectArt Annual Benefit at The Underground Museum

My Kids Could Do That: Famous Artists Put Their Childhood Drawings on view in LA

Openning Event: April 6th, 2018 at 7PM, on view through April 8th

1301PE artists, Petra Cortright, Diana Thater & Pae White are contributing works to this event.

How many times have you overheard—when standing in front of a contemporary work of art—a proud parent/disdainful viewer near you invoke the dismissive cliché: “my kid could do that?” Or maybe you’ve been guilty of thinking it yourself. We should all be so lucky to bear little geniuses that might grow up into the next Ed Ruscha, but sadly only a very small number ever reach that level. And those that do aren’t usually too quick to equate their career’s work with the output of a child.

So it’s unusual then, that a number of big-name contemporary U.S. artists—Ruscha, Jim Shaw, Lita Albuquerque, Catherine Opie, Diana Thater, Kenny Scharf, Alex Israel and Pae White among them—have decided to contribute their work to an exhibition named exactly that. But they’re not showing just any old work, they’re showing their old work—the art they made as children, lovingly preserved or perhaps rediscovered after languishing in boxes by their very own proud parents. Flying in the face of the idea that their geniuses are one in a million, these artists are putting their early scribbles on view in order to say: “Yes, your kid could do that.”

Opening April 6 at Los Angeles’ Underground Museum and on view for just three days, it’s part of a fundraising effort to raise support for ProjectArt, a nonprofit dedicated to making arts education available to children throughout the country by partnering with the public libraries for the use of space and hiring emerging artists as instructors. In spreading their mission, the organization recruited some of the most influential artists working today to talk about how art education got them to where they are today.

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ARTNEWS: Petra Cortright Tapped for Rizhome's 2018 Seven on Seven Conference

The digital arts nonprofit Rhizome has revealed the list of participants for this year’s Seven on Seven conference, an annual gathering that pairs artists and technologists so that they can produce a project together. The conference’s tenth edition will be held at the New Museum in New York on May 19, 2018.

Zachary Kaplan, the executive director of Rhizome, said in a statement, “Over ten editions, [Seven on Seven] has done so much to make the argument that the fields of technology and art must learn from one another, in ways that acknowledge their points of overlap and their specificities. But at the same time, it’s an opportunity to think about the future. Critiques of technology’s effects have become increasingly mainstream; what sort of alternatives might be imagined as part of Seven on Seven over the next decade?”

Below are a list of the artist-technologist pairings at this year’s Seven on Seven.

• Petra Cortright, artist, and Carl Tashian, engineer and entrepreneur
• Sara Cwynar, artist, and Cierra Sherwin, director of Color Product Development, Glossier
• Sean Raspet, artist and Nonfood cofounder, and Francis Tseng, designer and developer
• Tabita Rezaire, artist, and Kenric McDowell, director, Google Artists and Machine Intelligence
• Avery Singer, artist, and Matt Liston, founding member and ambassador, Gnosis
• Mika Tajima, artist, and Yasmin Green, R&D Director, Jigsaw at Alphabet Inc.
• Dena Yago, artist, and Yalda Mousavinia, founder, Space Cooperative

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Petra Cortright: Bank, Shanghai

Petra Cortright & Marc Horowitz

22 March - May 20, 2018

Bank

Basement Building 2

Lane 298 Anfu Road

Xuhui District, Shanghai

BANK is proud to present Petra Cortright and Marc Horowitz, marking the first time these married, LA-based artists are exhibiting their diverse but congruent creations together, and in Shanghai. 

Cortright is the poster-girl for ‘post-internet’ art, having come to fame with her lo-fi, webcam videos that, anticipated the rise of the selfie by exploring the perception of women online through her own eccentric ‘performances’. Cortright’s practice also includes intricate “touch-screen paintings” that are the ironic fusion of personal gesture and mass-production. Using digital software, she combines appropriated and self-generated elements in fantastical, all-over compositions that are printed on aluminum or fabrics. Cortright has exhibited at the New Museum, NY; Rhizome; Venice Biennale, Whitechapel Gallery, London; as well as at UCCA and MWoods Museum, Beijing. 

Horowitz’s social interventions helped garner him big media and artistic fame in the US by poking fun at the immediate present. Surprisingly Horowitz’s recent paintings seem preoccupied with making sense of the past. His “pile paintings” layer studio visitors’ footprints with citations of Italian Master paintings, which are then obliterated by cartoon-like color explosions. The resulting works reconcile disparate forces and embody the idea that “Each painting contains the memory of painting”. Horowitz’s satirical sculptural and video works question artifact and creativity in our non-linear, nomadic times. His work has been showcased in presentations at The Hayward Gallery, London; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; The Depart Foundation, LA and online with Creative Time, NY, etc.

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Rhizome: Petra Cortright: The Ephemera Mine

The Ephemera Mine by Bruce Sterling

This article accompanies the inclusion of Petra Cortright’s VVEBCAM in the online exhibition Net Art Anthology. The vintage punctuation of “net.art” here reflects the preferences of the author. For more about spelling and punctuation, see Rhizome’s style guide. – Ed.

How did one know that Petra Cortright was a “net.artist”? It was because YouTube was expelling her.

This particular Cortright video, VVEBCAM, looks inoffensive on the face of it. The face is Petra Cortright’s, and she’s examining the screen with much the same bemused expression as the online viewer.

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Petra Cortright: CAM WORLS, UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA

FEBRUARY 24 - APRIL 7, 2018

UTA Artist Space is pleased to present CAM WORLS, the first large-scale survey of Petra Cortright’s video work. Fifty of the artist’s videos, made between 2007 and 2017, will be on display, including eighteen never-before-exhibited artworks. The gallery will celebrate with an opening reception on Saturday, February 24, 2018, from 5-7PM.

Cortright’s computer-based practice pioneered a new kind of internet art. The videos in the show will trace the gradual evolution of her online presence, and a practice of perpetual modulation of over ten year of internet ephemera that mines decorative motifs from flowers to the female body. The archival impulse behind her work stresses the visual catchiness and mutability of the digital image, as well as the delicate and self-conscious act of putting oneself “online.” As an artist who “grew up on the internet,” Cortright carefully erects and investigates online trends of personhood as they appear in the culture, from the front-facing camera antics of solipsistic young girls on social media to virtual strippers.

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Petra Cortright: Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco

Petra Cortright
lambergani lambirgini lamborghini lambourgini
January 10 - March 24

Ever Gold [Projects]
1275 Minnesota St.
Suite 105, SF, CA, 94107

Petra Cortright’s core practice is the creation and distribution of digital files, whether they be videos, GIFs, or JPEGs, using consumer or corporate software and platforms. She has become renowned for making self-portrait videos that use her computer’s webcam and default effects tools, which she then uploads to YouTube. Cortright’s paintings on aluminum, linen, paper, or acrylic are created in Photoshop using painting software and appropriated images, icons, and marks. The digital files are endlessly modifiable, but at a “decisive moment” they are translated into two-dimensional objects. They become finite, yet their range of motifs and marks, and their disorienting perspectives and dimensions suggest dynamic change.

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Cultured: Petra Cortright: Young Artists 2018

Petra Cortright: Young Artists 2018 by Kat Herriman

Petra Cortright’s paintings begin as Photoshop files that the artist builds up layer by layer, stroke by stroke. Her methods of mark-making varies from brushes she designs to ones she downloads and jerry rigs. The Los Angeles-based artist spends the majority of her studio time surfing for the right low-res photographs, textures and programs to abstract into her fluid landscape compositions. “The abstraction in my work comes from using really bad quality images,” Cortright says. “I don’t feel bad about ripping shitty things apart. If it is really high definition with beautiful details it feels more precious. Why abstract that? I want to cut up things that aren’t working on their own.”

A painter reminiscent of Helen Frankenthaler, Cortright dilutes her original digital medium to create images that almost seem to glow, that create a space of their own. Printed on linen, aluminum and paper, the labor of Cortright’s research process is hidden by the lightness and deftness of her mark-making.

This January, Cortright will show a suite of new paintings as well as some videos at Ever Gold Projects in San Francisco. Like previous solo exhibitions at Société Berlin and Foxy Production, the artist plans to show her physical and digital works in a straightforward way. “I try to avoid gimmicks,” she says of her exhibition strategy. “I believe work should be able to stand on its own. I’ve never made the kind of work where you need to read an essay to understand it.” When asked what she does want to conjure in her work, her instinctual response deals with integrity and beauty. “I am a sincere person who wants to make sincere work,” she says. “We are in a weird time, where everyone thinks everything has to make some kind of a commentary, and not to say that work isn’t important, but I am okay with making something that is just an escape.”

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LA Times: Petra Cortright's digital paintings, a tangled web of dots and swipes

Petra Cortright's digital paintings, a tangled web of dots and swipes by Christopher Knight

Petra Cortright's paintings wedge themselves between the celebrated history of gestural art, mostly Expressionist and abstract, and the past generation's frantic upheaval of established visual norms generated by the emergence and now ubiquity of digital imagery.

Think of them as touch-screen paintings.

If you've ever done a drag-and-drop, you'll have a general idea of the five recent paintings in Cortright's inaugural solo exhibition at 1301PE. Digging around the Internet and using familiar computer software, she cobbles together pictures, palettes and markings into big, mostly dense and tangled compositions for printing on large sheets of rag paper and Belgian linen.

The squiggly marks on the surface recall the oily, swiped residue left behind by fingers on a smartphone or tablet. The big difference is that actual screen marks are tactile, while the smooth, inert surfaces of Cortright's digitally printed paintings are not. There's some tension between old and new conceptions of "the artist's touch," but as yet it's more cerebral than intuitive.

The intuition comes in the compositions. Cortright piles on loops, swoops, scribbles and slathers, invoking the ironic fusion of personal gesture and impersonal mass-production in Roy Lichtenstein's sleek brushstroke paintings from 1965-66. Where he made big gestures, however, which befit the crushing scale of the banality that had come to engulf Abstract Expressionist art, she taps into the sheer volume of today's roaring digital deluge.

Look closely, and an ancient Greco-Roman sculpture or a bunch of gaily colored pansies pokes through the enormous gestural mass. Nearby, in five flash-animation videos on small flat-screens, animals both real and imaginary — deer, fish, unicorn — likewise cavort through similarly gestural fields. These juxtapositions of digital culture with nature and material culture recall interests in video projections by Diana Thater and Jennifer Steinkamp. They're the work's most compelling feature.

In the relationship between these paintings and animations and the abandon of children's finger-paintings and the wackiness of SpongeBob SquarePants-style cartoons, there's also a hint of playfulness. Given the apparent inevitability of the printed work's inert surfaces, which operate like a visual mute button, Cortright would do well to ramp up that mischievousness.

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Artforum critics' picks: Petra Cortright at Carl Kostyal, London

Petra Cortright at Carl Kostyal, London by Valerie Mindlin

Carl Kostyal | London

12A Savile Row

October 5–November 19

To call Petra Cortright an internet or post-internet artist would be similar to calling Matisse and Monet paint artists. They were painters all right, but that's not really saying much, is it? There is, in Cortright's work, a mesmerizing core of formalism, a newly relevant medium specificity for the cognitive gluttonous distraction of the brazenly immaterial.

"ORANGE BLOSSOM PRINCESS FUCKING BUTTERCUP," Cortright's first solo exhibition at this gallery's London location, brings the manifold beguilements of her digital steamrolling into a tightly delightful showcase of canvases and flat-screen videos. And "flat-screen" is the operative word here. Cortright composes her pieces by layering their copious constituent files into final pancake of Photoshop "mother files." Such works flatten the layered and immersive aspects of the digital economy, simultaneously parading and exacerbating its manipulative properties. Cortright's mother files are built up from the endless iteration of what are profoundly private visual, temporal, and spatial entities. They are the wet-dream actors of adolescent sexual rehearsals, solipsistic webcam posturing, and distracted-browsing self-indulgence. Would you ever act out a real-life equivalent to an emoji in a conversation? Of course not. Cortright's works disrupt the comforting stability that would confine the digital to the servilely personal, and make a frantically gorgeous show of it.

Where Impressionism's heyday hypnotized us with its dynamic vibrancy in indulging the wondrous relish of the ordinary, Cortright's new digital formalism unmoors the cognitive comforts of the private in a seductive sumptuousness of pageantry and inexhaustible possibilities.

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The New York Times: The Mission to Save Vanishing Internet Art

The Mission to Save Vanishing Internet Art by Frank Rose

In the early days of the web, art was frequently a cause and the internet was an alternate universe in which to pursue it. Two decades later, preserving this work has become a mission. As web browsers and computer operating systems stopped supporting the software tools they were built with, many works have fallen victim to digital obsolescence. Later ones have been victims of arbitrary decisions by proprietary internet platforms — as when YouTube deleted Petra Cortright's video "VVEBCAM" on the grounds that it violated the site's community guidelines. Even the drip paintings Jackson Pollock made with house paint have fared better than art made by manipulating electrons.

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