Installation view, Victoria Gitman, Everything is Surface: Twenty Years of Painting, 2022, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles
Everything is Surface: Twenty Years of Painting represents the most comprehensive survey of Victoria Gitman’s work to date, including 27 paintings and drawings spanning the years 2001 through 2022.
Victoria Gitman’s deceptively diminutive oil paintings—typically less than ten inches on any side—depict closely observed surfaces: dyed furs of vintage handbags, geometric tessellations of sequins or beads, glinting costume jewelry. Each painting is months in the making and a product of deep looking and careful craft, bestowing an auratic quality on these objects of kitsch. Sometimes cropped close and sometimes resting on monochromatic surfaces, they carry a sense of weight and tactility, luring the viewer into a close proximity where vision and touch begin to merge.
Every bead, sequin, or wisp of fur is painted by Gitman individually, through a one-to-one transposition, with patience, meticulousness, and, one might suspect, even a touch of alchemy. There is a bit of ineffable magic to her paintings, an illusionistic transubstantiation.
- Debra Singer
Installation view, Victoria Gitman, Everything is Surface: Twenty Years of Painting, 2022, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles
Gitman frequently engages the history of painting in her own sly, subtle ways. Despite demonstrating a mastery of figurative depiction, her choices of subject, composition, and color frequently evoke the history of twentieth century abstraction. Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko—these giants of non-objective painting become reanimated in the furs and sequins of Gitman’s handbags, an inversion of representation, scale, and machismo. Another series similarly addresses an earlier history of representation, this time in exquisite oil on board renderings of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s graphite on paper drawings. These paintings cross wires between mediums, confounding the eye and exposing what Gitman calls “the understructures of style.”
Our modes of looking decelerate as the brain grapples with mixed messages about textures commingling with temperatures, shadows with light. Her paintings direct our vision, even as they transform it, provoking a dramatic slowness of seeing that is a welcome refuge.
- Debra Singer
Installation view, Victoria Gitman, Everything is Surface: Twenty Years of Painting, 2022, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles
The title of the exhibition, Everything is Surface, is a line from John Ashbery’s poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” The phrase reflects Gitman’s career-long exploration of surface, both as material reality and conceptual field. Her work blends a focus on the seductive surfaces of objects and an attention to the pictorial surface itself, the skin of the painting. In each work, Gitman aligns the represented surface and the picture plane, bringing to the foreground the tactile desire implicit in the experience of viewing paintings.
Everything is Surface: Twenty Years of Painting is on view at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles from April 2 - May 2, 2022.