Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce Victoria Gitman, an exhibition of paintings and drawings at 529 West 20th Street. Opening on January 8, 2015, the exhibition is the artist's first in the United States since 2011. Seven of Gitman's astonishingly naturalistic paintings will be on view, in addition to eight figure drawings, all created between 2012 and 2014. The exhibition opens in advance of the artist's first mid-career retrospective, Victoria Gitman: Desiring Eye (2015, Pérez Art Museum Miami).

The exhibition focuses on two bodies of Gitman's recent work—life-sized “portraits” of fur purses and a series of diminutive drawings based on compositions by the Old Masters. Set against shallow, neutral-colored backgrounds, each of the fur purses is meticulously rendered from close, direct observation. Gitman paints in oils, hair by hair, creating surfaces that are soft and seductive, yet austere in their precision. Many of the purses feature abstract patterns evocative of early and mid-twentieth century painterly traditions. Evoking modernist compositional techniques, Gitman's paintings are resolutely frontal, their imagery extending nearly edge-to-edge. A number of the paintings reinforce this subtle formal dialogue by incorporating veiled references to canonical artists like Kazimir Malevich and Mark Rothko. Like her paintings, Gitman's new figure drawings are also about the erotics of vision. Her tightly cropped figures hover just on the surface of the picture plane, almost within the viewer's reach. Simultaneously, the medium—graphite on Mylar—lends the images a kind of evanescence, an immaterial quality that makes them difficult to fully grasp.

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), and Tomio Koyama Gallery (2014, Tokyo). In 2005, the Bass Museum of Art, Miami mounted On Display, Gitman's first museum exhibition. Three years later, Looking Closely, a solo-exhibition of paintings and drawings, opened at the Las Vegas Art Museum.

Gitman's work is featured in the collections of many museums, including: the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Victoria Gitman.

Victoria Gitman will be on view at Garth Greenan Gallery, 529 West 20th Street (between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues), through Saturday, February 14, 2015. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. For more information, please contact Garth Greenan at (212) 929-1351, or email garth@garthgreenan.com.