Cortright’s new series combines two of her great loves—flowers and the sea—in some of her most aesthetically pristine and philosophically engaging works to date. Front and center in each composition is a single flower which Cortright plucks from her “mother file”—the vast archive of Internet-appropriated images she has been collecting over the years. The flowers, which range from water-lilies to desert plants such as aloe, come from many different regions, biomes, and seasons. They float on hazy backgrounds that read as abstracted seascapes, which she creates by layering together hundreds of semi-transparent washes of digital brush effects and colored gradients.

Cortright calls these background layers “veils.” Whether we think of Salome’s seductive Dance of the Seven Veils or the concept in Gnostic mysticism that the true nature of the physical universe is veiled from us by layers of illusion, Cortright’s veils suggest a universe of magical appearances where nothing that meets the eye can ever fully be trusted.

Metaphysical questions abound in Cortright’s art, which perennially tests the boundaries between the virtual and the real while puncturing the veils of painterly illusion. WINTER SUNLIGHT CASTLE WINDOW takes these metaphysical investigations a step further. By floating each flower mid-air above a numinous background, the new works reference a vast corpus of sacred and mythological paintings. Dry desert plants appear to be born miraculously from the sea, like the titular goddess in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Other flowers float heavenward on rays of light that seem to stream down from unseen windows in the sky, recalling the many depictions of the Ascension in Renaissance art.

Just as Surrealists like Dalí used Renaissance illusionism to create their own dreamlike fantasies, Cortright creates similarly fantastical landscapes using twenty-first century tools. The light sources in these works are intentionally contradictory, representing a combination of drop shadows, stock images, and other digital pre-sets and effects. Her celestial rays of “castle window” light do not change the illumination of the flowers in the foreground, and her trompe-l’oeil drop shadows affirm the flatness of the picture plane.

Petra Cortright (b. 1986, Santa Barbara) lives and works in Los Angeles. She recently presented a large-scale video installation on the Münsterplatz at the 2023 edition of Art Basel Parcours. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Palm Springs Art Museum; 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 MoMA New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; New Museum, New York; and 12th Biennale de Lyon.