Petra Cortright: fresh floral ice milk soft blue bruise
Petra Cortright’s first exhibition at the gallery in Seoul, fresh floral ice milk soft blue bruise, brings together a new series of digital paintings that expand on her ongoing exploration of the threshold between the handmade and the algorithmic, between materiality and the ephemeral logic of the screen. This body of work, rooted in her signature practice of digital mark-making, takes on a new, almost romantic sensibility—an abstraction of flowers, gestures, and painterly movements that feel at once fluid and fractured, organic yet undeniably digital.
Cortright is widely recognized as one of the defining artists of the post-internet generation. Emerging from the early 2000s wave of net art, she first gained attention for her webcam videos—lo-fi, self-recorded performances that explored self-representation, online identity, and the aesthetics of everyday digital interfaces. Over the years, her practice has expanded into a new kind of digital painting, one that treats Photoshop not as a preparatory tool but as a primary site of creation. Using countless layers of digital brushstrokes, manipulated textures, and found imagery, she composes works that reference both the history of painting and the visual language of the internet—where beauty, excess, and fragmentation coexist in a state of constant flux.
At first glance, the works in fresh floral ice milk soft blue bruise recall the rich history of floral still-life painting—evoking the Impressionists’ fascination with light and transience, or the way Dutch Golden Age vanitas paintings meditated on beauty and impermanence. But Cortright’s flowers are not observed from life; rather, they are assembled, altered, and recombined within the logic of digital composition. They emerge from Photoshop’s layered infrastructure, where marks are stacked, erased, and reworked—strokes that can be undone and redone endlessly, resulting in compositions that feel at once organic and weightless, as if hovering between presence and disappearance.
Her paintings, displayed in varying formats—from intimate squares to expansive horizontal compositions—pulse with atmospheric textures and shifting densities of mark-making. In some, petals seem to dissolve into painterly mist; in others, bouquets appear to flicker, as if caught between states of resolution and collapse. These are not still lifes, but unstable lives—images on the verge of change, impermanence built into their very DNA.
The titles, with their fragmented filenames and procedural structure, suggest a workflow in motion rather than a static finality. They are traces of the digital studio, a nod to the infrastructure of contemporary image-making—where paintings do not simply exist but are processed, exported, stored, and rendered. Unlike traditional painting, which accumulates material on a canvas, Cortright’s process is one of accumulation through deletion and revision, where each brushstroke is a decision that can be reversed, reconfigured, or endlessly reimagined.
Despite their digital origins, the final works exist in the physical world as unique prints on canvas bridging the screen-based aesthetics of our time with the materiality of painting’s past. By choosing substrates that reflect or absorb light differently, she preserves the dynamic, shifting quality of the digital image, reinforcing the idea that these paintings are never fully fixed.
