Victoria Gitman (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1974)
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1972, Victoria Gitman immigrated to the United States in 1987. In 1996, she graduated from Florida International University with a BFA in Painting and a BA in Humanities. She was also a fellow at the Yale Summer School of Art.
Victoria Gitman’s work intertwines the experiences of vision and touch, exploring the tactile pull inherent to painting and the circuits of desire it generates. Beginning in the early 2000s with her representations of vintage costume jewelry and beaded purses, and continuing with her current series depicting fur handbags, the artist has focused on the seductive material textures of these objects. The works create an alignment between the purses and the picture plane, pointing to the implicit identification of the painting’s surface as feminine and bringing to the fore the traditionally gendered structure of the painting-viewer relationship.
Gitman’s subjects are sourced from flea markets, vintage stores, and secondhand shops online. Painted bead by bead and hair by hair, the objects are limned in actual scale from close, direct observation. With their fine facture and intimate scale, Gitman’s paintings elicit very close viewing, an almost touching with the eyes. The distance between beholder and picture plane is narrowed to the smallest of measures and the condensed space between them, charged with a palpable desire, becomes part of the work. The close, slow interaction that results between viewer and painting, the almost contact between them, thus emerges as an integral element of her work.
Victoria Gitman’s paintings and drawings are held in the collections of many museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others.
Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Daniel Weinberg Gallery (2004, 2006, 2009, Los Angeles), David Nolan Gallery (2006, 2011, New York), Tomio Koyama Gallery (2014, Tokyo), and Garth Greenan Gallery (2015, 2018, New York). In 2005, the Bass Museum, Miami mounted On Display, Gitman’s first museum exhibition. Three years later, Looking Closely, a solo exhibition of her paintings and drawings, opened at the Las Vegas Art Museum. In 2015, the Pérez Art Museum Miami presented Victoria Gitman: Desiring Eye, a mid-career survey of her work.
Victoria Gitman is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.
