Avery Singer’s War of Images

“Am I a 9/11 survivor?” Avery Singer asks.

The American artist turned fourteen on 10 September 2001. The following morning, alone in her family’s Tribeca apartment, she heard the thunderous sound of a plane’s engine and then a long explosion “that felt like an earthquake”. Looking out of the window, she saw the North Tower of the World Trade Center burning. Later that day, she watched people fall to their deaths from the upper floors of the building, “wondering if they’d chosen to jump”. That night, after evacuating Lower Manhattan, her family slept in the projection booth at the Museum of Modern Art, where her father worked as a projectionist.

The experience did not end as night fell on New York. “The images of human body parts scattered across my neighbourhood are burnt into my memory,” she has written when introducing her art. “The injured man I saw lying in the doorway of my school. The engine from the second plane which exploded on my street, a severed hand found on my best friend's windowsill.”

How did she make sense of something like this, at the age of fourteen? “I was very young, so I was confused,” she says when we meet in the back offices of Hauser & Wirth’s Limmatstrasse gallery during Zürich Gallery Weekend.

“I hadn’t really thought about the world in the framework of geopolitical struggles,” she says. “I thought I was lucky, being born in America. We don’t have wars. Then suddenly I was in a war one day in my neighbourhood.”

What followed was stranger still. As the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq unfolded, Singer found herself watching a chaotic and deadly conflict transform into a form of mass entertainment.

“I remember sitting in my apartment with my parents,” she says. “We’re an American family looking at the TV for entertainment – and it’s a war. It’s an actual, real war. It’s not a television show. It’s not a movie.”

She pauses. “But it was being presented to me as entertainment. I think my inner sceptic sort of awakened at that moment.”

Avery Singer, Daniela, 2026, acrylic on canvas stretched over aluminum panel, 241.9 x 216.5 x 5.3 cm © Avery Singer. Photo: Lance Brewer. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Nearly twenty-five years later, that scepticism remains one of the central engines of Singer’s practice. Raised in Tribeca in a creative family (she is named after the painter Milton Avery), Singer was raised on a steady diet of contemporary art. But, before studying painting at Cooper Union, she imagined becoming a mathematician or software engineer. This blend of coding-style thinking and painting has been part of her life long before today’s focus on artificial intelligence. 

Although she is routinely described as a painter of technology, software and digital culture, her work is concerned with something broader: how events become images, how images become memory, and what is left once both have passed through what we term the media.

Those questions lie at the heart of War_overlays, her latest exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Zürich, on view until September 5, 2026. The paintings here are less about warfare itself than the unstable relationship between moments like 9/11 and the fragments through which they are remembered and understood. Military iconography, interface graphics, fragmented figures and overlapping visual languages collide across Singer's canvases, reflecting a world in which war is encountered through screens, in ways often indivisible from gambling adverts, movie clips or video game excerpts.

The exhibition extends ideas first explored in Free Fall, Singer’s 2023 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London. There, for the first time, she addressed her experience of 9/11 directly. Reconstructing from memory the anonymous corporate interiors of the World Trade Center where her mother had occasionally worked as an office clerk until 2000, Singer transformed Hauser & Wirth’s Mayfair gallery into an uncanny reconstruction of a place that is both woven into her childhood and permanently lost. Visitors reportedly mistook the recreated ground-floor elevator lobby for a functioning lift, attempting to enter it in the belief that the exhibition continued on an unseen floor high above the gallery.

Reflecting on those events as an adult also led Singer to a different question. “There's no documentary footage from inside the Towers,” she says. If 9/11 happened today, it would unfold through livestreams, smartphone footage and social media feeds. “It would be on everyone’s phone” she says. “It would be livestreamed, shared, turned into content.”

Portrait of Avery Singer, 2026 © Avery Singer. Photo: Christian DeFonte. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

The observation helps explain why, despite her embrace of digital tools, Singer remains committed to painting itself. Before our interview, she gives a tour of War_overlays to a waiting audience. Among those listening is Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz, who, after pausing before one canvas, spends almost as much time studying its reverse as its painted surface. The unframed stretcher, held together with industrial clips, stands in deliberate contrast to the polished, digitally inflected imagery built up in thick layers of acrylic.

Working with 3D modelling software, industrial airbrushing and painstaking manual interventions, Singer constructs figures that appear simultaneously human and synthetic. The exposed canvas, visible stretcher and industrial hardware insist that, however technologically mediated they are, these remain persistently physical paintings.

“That presentation is part of the idea,” she says when I recount how Horowitz related to them. “You’re showing the canvas as a very raw thing, but it’s been covered in this very polished painting, which looks maybe like something you would see on a screen. It’s tension that I'm interested in exploring.”

Singer’s approach to painting owes much to the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity, movement that emerged in Weimar Germany during the 1920s. Looking at artists such as Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and Christian Schad, she sees a historical template. Like those painters, Singer is interested less in portraiture than in recording the social motifs produced by a particular historical moment.

“I love the Neue Sachlichkeit,” she says. “There’s just something so foreboding if you look at art from this period in Germany, because you know what’s coming – the erasure of most of the subjects in the paintings.”

The paintings endure because the world they depicted does not. “A very radical culture is depicted in the paintings,” she says. “They were really on the cutting edge, developing new ideas about living in modern society, and then it all just gets wiped out.”

Almost a century apart, the parallel with Singer’s own work is difficult to miss. “I think there's probably something that draws me into this narrative,” she says. “Because those are the enduring images of these lost people.”

Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait with a Cigarette, 1947, oil on canvas. Courtesy Harvard Art Museums

That perspective reframes War_overlays. During our tour and throughout our conversation, Singer repeatedly recalls Jean Baudrillard’s writings on 20th century warfare: not whether events occur, but how media transforms the reality through which they are experienced. Modern debates of manipulated imagery, algorithmic feeds and artificial intelligence all circle the same question: what happens when representation begins to shape the event itself?

“Baudrillard is very interesting to me,” Singer says. “I think he’s very relevant and he will continue to be very relevant. If you read his analyses of the first Gulf War and its relationship to the media, how the media reflected the Vietnam War, or the Persian War... You know, my dad protested the Vietnam War, and he was really impacted by the way the war was presented on television at the time.”

Singer belongs to a generation that witnessed the transition from broadcast media to the internet in real time. The world of Free Fall was one of television broadcasts and newspaper front pages. The world of War_overlays is one of algorithmic timelines and information ecosystems that blur the distinction between witnessing and participating, truth and propaganda, humanitarian crisis and cinematic spectacle.

That evolution can also be traced through her recent exhibition history. In run_it_back.exeˇ, presented at the Serralves Museum in Porto in 2025, Singer transformed Álvaro Siza's museum into an uncanny landscape of waiting rooms, fitted carpets, office furniture and fluorescent lighting populated by crypto traders, digital avatars and so-called online communities.

The exhibition was not really about cryptocurrency any more than War_overlays is simply about war. Instead, Singer used these communities much as New Objectivity painters once depicted industrialists, circus performers or Berlin’s Bohemia when the Nazi party were still an ignored fringe: as social types capable of revealing the character of a historical moment. If Otto Dix painted the fractured society of Weimar Germany, Singer paints the subjects produced and invented by algorithmic capitalism.

The scepticism that Singer remembers awakening in front of a television during the Iraq War has never really left. What began as a teenager questioning why real conflict resembled entertainment has become an effort to document history as image–and to determine which images might endure from our violent days.