Gretchen Andrew's Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty
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Early Success
Exhibited for the first time with Tender Gallery at Untitled Miami December 2024, Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty has already won praise and awards while joining some of today's most interesting collections including Untitled's Acqusition Award from 21C Museum Hotels and the RF.C Collection renown for it's pattern of collecting big stars early.
Contemporary Connected History
Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty is a limited oil painting series that incorporates A.I., Algorithms, and Robotics into the production process while maintaining the easy collectability and preservation of traditional oil painting. Gretchen trained with the famous British painter Billy Childish and is known for her unique merger of technology and traditional media.
Understand the Facetune Portrait Process
Facetune Portraits use custom robotics 🤖 to physically apply popular “beautifying” AI 👄 into oil paintings 🎨. The resulting Facetune Portraits reveal the tension between who we are and who AI and algorithms say we should be.
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About Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty
In Gretchen Andrew’s new series of Facetune Portraits, custom robotics scribe the popular AI-driven beauty filters of social media into oil paintings derived from images of quintessential beauty. Normally, on TikTok and via Zoom’s “touch up” feature, 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, Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty looks at the homogenizing impact of this 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. While unaltered human faces coexist with the algorithmically 'perfected' versions, a double portrait is created – a visualization of reality meeting desire. 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.
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Not Her First Rodeo
Prior to the Sept 2024 launch of Facetune Portrait's Gretchen Andrew's work was already collected by museums from America and Austria
Gretchen Andrew is known for her unique merger of traditional artistic mediums such as photography and oil paint with advanced technologies such as robotics, algorithm and artificial intelligence. She first became known starting in 2019 with her hacks on major art world and political institutions.
She trained in London with the artist Billy Childish from 2012-2017. In 2018 the V&A Museum released her book Search Engine Art. Gretchen's work has recently been featured in Artforum, Fast Company, Flash Art, The Washington Post, Fortune Magazine, and The Financial Times.
FACETUNE PORTRAITS FEATURED & EXHIBITED
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