Gretchen Andrew

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty

SOLO I

MAY 15 - JUN 21, 2025

COLLECT ARTWORKS

Exhibiting

HEFT Gallery 300 Broome LES May 14 to June 10

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.

Including one contestant in gown and one in swimsuit per country, 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. In these paintings, unaltered human faces coexist with the algorithmically 'perfected' versions, creating a double portrait – 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.

Artworks

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty: Bahrain, gown

Gretchen Andrew

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty: Brazil, gown

Gretchen Andrew

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty: Dominican Republic, gown

Gretchen Andrew

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty: Equitorial Guinea, gown

Gretchen Andrew

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty: Finland, gown

Gretchen Andrew

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty: France, gown

Gretchen Andrew

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty: Italy, gown

Gretchen Andrew

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty: Jamaica, gown

Gretchen Andrew

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty: Japan, gown

Gretchen Andrew

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty: Philippines, gown

Gretchen Andrew

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty: Puerto Rico, gown

Gretchen Andrew

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty: Russia, gown

Gretchen Andrew

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty: USA, gown

Gretchen Andrew

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty: USA, gown

Oil painting on stretched canvas

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty: Venezuela, gown

Gretchen Andrew

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty: Vietnam, gown

Gretchen Andrew

“The conflict between art and politics... cannot and must not be solved.”

Hannah Arendt