For the 2023 edition of The Art Show, organized by ADAA, Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to present a selection of new paintings by Victoria Gitman.

The small-scale paintings are loaded with nested paradoxes: They are astonishingly naturalistic yet compositionally abstract; analytical yet sensuous; prosaic yet ambitious. Each painting depicts a different sequined article of clothing. The compositions are tightly cropped, so that the brightly colored garments almost completely fill the picture plane—creating vivid, abstract patterns.

In some instances, the paintings are in subtle dialogue with modernist traditions, echoing tropes of formalist abstraction with their grids, stripes, swirls, and targets. Sometimes, however, the references become more direct. The concentric circular design of Untitled (2023), for example, recalls the paintings of Sonia Delaunay (whose own interdisciplinary work in painting, textiles, and design already pointed to the links and cross fertilization between art and fashion).

Gitman’s virtuosic paint handling recalls the luscious pigmentation and detail of a European masterpiece, but her gendered subject matter and strikingly small compositions reject the historical valorizing of myth, gods, power, and property typical of the genre, as well as the grand scale of later modernist abstraction. The intimate works lure viewers, inviting and rewarding prolonged looking.

The sequined fabrics themselves are gaudy, and the majority of them are sourced from thrift stores, Ebay, and other secondhand sources. Despite their unglamorous provenance, Gitman treats them with the care of a highly skilled court painter depicting their royal benefactor’s finest possessions. The paintings are products of monastic focus, each one taking months of painstaking work to complete. Each of the thousands of sequins is treated as a singular object. The modest textiles are transubstantiated into luminous, gem-like oil paintings.

In ways, the paintings are analytical, even austere technical studies, yet they quickly give way to the opposite. The works are distilled sensation, and tactile in the extreme. Each painting is perfected until, as the artist puts it, “sight and touch are indistinguishable.”

Gitman’s recent paintings extend her series of works depicting fur purses, beaded handbags, and costume jewelry that featured in her mid-career retrospective Victoria Gitman: Desiring Eye at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2015. The feminine objects are loaded with associations of frivolity, materialism, and gaudiness. The paintings vacillate between the erotic, mundane, luxurious, and transcendent.

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. She has had solo exhibitions at Daniel Weinberg Gallery (2004, 2006, 2009, Los Angeles), David Nolan Gallery (2006, 2011, New York), Tomio Koyama Gallery (2014, Tokyo), Garth Greenan Gallery (2015, 2018, New York), and Francois Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles, 2020, 2022). In 2005, the Bass Museum, Miami mounted On Display, her first museum exhibition. Three years later, Looking Closely, a solo exhibition of her paintings and drawings, opened at the Las Vegas Art Museum.

Gitman’s work is featured in the collections of many museums, including: the Columbus Museum of Art; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, Miami; the Herbert H. Johnson Art Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Museum of Modern Art; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Portland Art Museum; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Victoria Gitman.