Petra Cortright in Conversation with Brian Butler
Talk
18 July 2026
2pm
Los Angeles artist Petra Cortright is visiting Australia for her solo show at 1301SW, Gadigal/Sydney. And she’s giving a talk at the IMA. In conversation with 1301SW Director Brian Butler, she will discuss her latest body of work.
Cortright is a leading figure in net and post-internet art. She rose to prominence in the 2000s with her low-fi self-portrait videos. Using a domestic webcam, she recorded herself acting playfully or stoically, adding effects, animations, and GIFs. She captioned her videos with spam text, curses, and search-engine-optimisation keywords and uploaded them. Removed by YouTube in 2010 for its provocative spam tags, her landmark 2007 video VVEBCAM is now in the Museum of Modern Art collection.
Cortright subsequently moved into ‘painting’. In Photoshop, she compiled images harvested from Google, Pinterest, and Bing with digital brushstrokes. She was less concerned with the content of her source images than their colours and textures. She built mother files with hundreds of layers, which she excavated, then printed the results. Conflating an impressionist look with the computer screen’s glow—and confounding the digital-analog divide—Cortright has been dubbed the ‘Monet of the twenty-first century’.
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Petra Cortright studied at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and Parsons School of Design, New York. She has had solo shows at Palm Springs Art Museum; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles; Depart Foundation, Los Angeles; Living Media Art, Amsterdam; University of Edinburgh; and Doota Plaza, Seoul. She has been in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; New Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Center of Contemporary Arts, Sante Fe; Lab for Emerging Arts and Performance, Berlin; Kunstlerhaus Bremen; KM–Halle für Kunst and Medien, Graz; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Kunsthaus Langenthal; Espai Cultural Caja Madrid, Barcelona; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; and Museum de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. She has shown in the 2008 New York Underground Film Festival, the 2009 Lyon Biennale, and the 2009 Venice Biennale’s Internet Pavilion. She is represented by 1301PE, Los Angeles, and 1301SW, Gadigal/Sydney and Naarm/Melbourne. She lives in Los Angeles.
Petra Cortright.
