File:Gina Beavers Doll Lips 2021.jpg

Painting by Gina Beavers, Doll Lips (acrylic on linen on panel, 48" x 48" x 9", 2021). The image illustrates a key and longstanding body of paintings by Gina Beavers involving images of step-by-step cosmetics application guides, generally based on appropriated images from social media and internet sources. These paintings—exploring subjects such as how to get "sun-kissed lips" and "smoky eye"—are characteristically built of thickly applied, tactile paint and often feature grid of sequential images that match common formats found on platforms such as Instagram. Critics have described them as both aesthetic and didactic objects that are critical, affirming, uncanny and unsettling in their presentations of contemporary digitally mediated life. This view of a painting from off to one side illustrates the relief qualities that apply to most of Beaver's work. This body of work and individual piece were publicly exhibited in prominent exhibitions and discussed by critics in major art journals and daily press publications.

Artist Gina Beavers. Copyright held by the artist.

Gina Beavers

Entire artwork

Yes

The image serves an informational and educational purpose as the primary means of illustrating a key body of work by Gina Beavers from throughout her career: her sculptural acrylic paintings of step-by-step cosmetics techniques, which have been based on appropriated images from Instagram snapshots and internet sources, often found by using hashtags such as #makeuptutorial. These paintings both critique contemporary attitudes toward bodies, beauty and culture and appreciate efforts at self-improvement, re-creation and self-affirmation. She paints them with thickly built, sticky accretions—often within gridded formats that match the typical formats of Instagram—that mimic the activity of makeup application, but also undermine the gloss and sense of effortless glamour that the original digital sources attempt to convey. Because the article is about an artist and her work, the omission of the image would significantly limit a reader's understanding and ability to understand this key body of work, which brought Beavers initial and ongoing recognition through exhibitions, coverage by major critics and publications. Beavers's work of this type and this series is discussed in the article and by critics cited in the article.

There is no free equivalent of this or any other of this series by Gina Beavers, and the work no longer is viewable, so the image cannot be replaced by a free image.

The image will not affect the value of the original work or limit the copyright holder's rights or ability to distribute the original due to its low resolution and the general workings of the art market, which values the actual work of art. Because of the low resolution, illegal copies could not be made.