Petra Cortright: ULTRAMARINE UNDERWORLD HEARTBROKEN HARDCORE
15 March – 20 April 2024

Société is pleased to announce ULTRAMARINE UNDERWORLD HEARTBROKEN HARDCORE, Petra Cortright’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.

The American artist Petra Cortright has described herself as a “defender of beauty and simplicity.” Her passion for plants and gardens has profoundly influenced her artistic work, particularly her attention to the subtle nuances of shadow and the distinct California light that pervades many of her works. While her recent depictions of turbulent landscapes or manic accumulations of flowers possessed a more frenetic character, Cortright’s newest paintings on aluminum exude a sense of delicacy and calm. These pared-down compositions render lone plants or flowers in painstaking detail with custom digital brushes. Crafted in the style of botanical drawings or herbarium sheets, Cortright’s new works have their aesthetic roots in early visual systems of documenting, collecting, and classifying the natural world. Each specimen is depicted amidst a hazy gradient of greens, blues, and greys as if levitating in a dreamlike void. “Plants have for millennia served as the static backdrop of human dramas,” the art historian Giovanni Aloi writes. “Despite being some of the most indispensable pillars of our planet’s biosystems, plants’ fixity and laconic essence have meant that they can be willfully overlooked, ignored, and written out of history.” Cortright’s botanical paintings bring the speed of the digital into a productive friction with the slowness of plant-time, inviting us to consider how the vegetal occupies space and time—and how engaging with plants might reconfigure our cognitive rhythms to connect with other biological systems.

Petra Cortright (b. 1986, Santa Barbara) lives and works in Los Angeles. In 2023, her video work green hill green light esprit de corps was exhibited at Art Basel Parcours. Cortright’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs; Doota Plaza, Seoul; LIMA, Amsterdam; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles; University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh; and Depart Foundation, Los Angeles. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions at international venues including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; KM – Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Kunsthaus Langenthal, Langenthal; New Museum, New York; 12th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon; and SJ01 Biennial, San Jose.