We are proud to congratulate our Editorial Director, Gretchen Andrew, on the Whitney Museum's acquisition of her two paintings, 'Facetune Portrait - Universal Beauty, USA' and 'Facetune Portrait - Universal Beauty, Puerto Rico'. Put forward for acquisition by Curator of Digital Art Christiane Paul, the acquisition committee “enthusiastically and unanimously voted to acquire the two paintings.”
Facetune Portraits use custom robotics to physically paint popular “beautifying” AI-driven filters into oil paintings. The resulting portraits reveal the tension between who we are and who AI and algorithms say we should be.
The acquisition via Heft Gallery marks a significant institutional milestone for Gretchen Andrew, whose work has also been acquired by The 21C Museum winning 2024’s Untitled Acquisition Prize.
ABOUT THE SERIES | FACETUNE PORTRAITS: UNIVERSAL BEAUTY
In Facetune Portraits: UNIVERSAL BEAUTY, Gretchen Andrew uses custom robotics to scribe popular AI-driven beauty filters from social media into oil paintings derived from pageant queens from around the world. Normally 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 homogenising 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. 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.
THE MAKING OF | FACETUNE PORTRAITS: UNIVERSAL BEAUTY
1. Digital Facetune – Using popular phone apps called Facetune and Body Tune Gretchen puts the original digital file into the Facetune and Body Tune apps and selects for the apps to use AI to “enhance” the image. This results in a digitally modified photo, known colloquially as a “facetuned photo.” These modifications are chosen by the app which shows a screen “AI at work” during the image processing.
2. Create an all-white under painting to add texture and painterly effect.
3. Print the original image in oil paint.
4. Apply the Facetune modifications physically – The wet oil painting is placed under an XY-axis drawing robot. The robot, instructed by the discrepancies between the original image and an AI-modified (Facetuned) version, adds brushstrokes where lines have changed. This process visually highlights the AI's alterations, creating messy paint strokes that attempt to reconcile the differences, rather than seamlessly editing pixel
