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Laborinformationststeme_laborwerte, 2017
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Details
Medium: Digital painting on anodized aluminum
Year: 2017
Sheet size: 48 x 94"
Image size: 48 x 94"
Year: 2017
Sheet size: 48 x 94"
Image size: 48 x 94"
About the Work
"Laborinformationststeme_laborwerte" is a digital painting on anodized aluminum created by Petra Cortright in 2017. The artwork is unframed and hung with a french cleat and has an image size of 48 x 94".
Petra Cortright (b. 1986) has emerged as one of the defining artists of the digital age, pioneering a visual language that dissolves the boundaries between painting, technology, and the internet. Working with consumer software, digital tools, and the aesthetics of online culture, Cortright belongs to a generation of artists who transformed the computer screen into a legitimate site of artistic production. Her work examines how images are created, circulated, altered, and consumed in an era shaped by interfaces and data, while remaining deeply engaged with the history of painting. Her works are held in major institutional collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the New Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Tate, underscoring her significance within contemporary art.
Executed in 2017, "Laborinformationststeme_laborwerte" exemplifies Cortright’s distinctive fusion of digital process and painterly effect. Created digitally and realized on anodized aluminum, the work occupies a space between technological innovation and traditional painting. At first glance, the composition blooms with color, texture, and movement. Layered floral forms and luminous passages appear to drift across the metallic surface, creating a field that oscillates between abstraction and representation. The image recalls the gardens of Impressionism and the gestural expansiveness of Abstract Expressionism, yet its origins are unmistakably contemporary.
Cortright’s method replaces the conventional brush with software. She builds compositions from hundreds, sometimes thousands, of virtual marks, layering and manipulating them with precision before fixing the final image onto aluminum. The resulting surface has a distinctive luminosity: light seems to emanate from within the work, shifting as the viewer moves around it. In this way, Cortright transforms pixels into something physical and enduring, challenging the distinction between the virtual image and the material object.
The title, "Laborinformationststeme_laborwerte," offers an important key to Cortright’s practice. At first, its wording appears opaque, even erroneous. Read closely, however, it resembles a corrupted German compound: likely a fractured version of "Laborinformationssysteme_laborwerte," or “laboratory information systems_lab values.” The underscore, misspelling, and clinical vocabulary suggest the language of filenames, search terms, databases, or scraped digital fragments. Rather than clarifying the image, the title introduces the unstable logic of the internet itself: linguistic glitches, machine-readable phrasing, mistranslation, and metadata detached from human expression.
This tension is central to the work’s power. Against the lush, almost lyrical beauty of the image, the title invokes systems of information, classification, and data. Cortright allows these worlds to coexist: the sensual and the computational, the painterly and the procedural, the garden and the database. "Laborinformationststeme_laborwerte" is therefore not simply a digitally produced painting, but a meditation on how contemporary images are shaped by the hidden languages of technology. It captures the visual consciousness of the twenty-first century while preserving the immediacy, beauty, and presence of painting.
Laborinformationststeme_laborwerte, 2017
Regular price
$78,500.00
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