Victoria Gitman: Zippers

Opening Reception:
Friday, November 7, 6–8PM

François Ghebaly is proud to present Zippers, Victoria Gitman’s latest exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery.

Miami-based Argentine artist Victoria Gitman creates diminutive, jewel-like oil paintings that mine ideas of illusionism, the sensorium, and histories of high abstraction. Drawing from found and vintage objects like accessories and intricate textiles, she crafts painstaking, dizzyingly realistic images that interlink physical and visual senses. Her latest exhibition, Zippers, features works from a new series depicting fields of white fur interrupted by zippers in various states of partial opening. Their subtle variations in color and composition speak to Gitman’s continued interest in seriality and the material and perceptual properties of the medium. 

Set across the sprawling white walls of the gallery space are five intimate paintings that hover in and out of visibility. From a distance, the white fur nearly dissolves into the walls, with only the emphatic vertical lines of colored zippers marking the space. This spare installation invites a kind of itinerant movement through the exhibition, drawing the eye in close proximity with each work, where the materiality of the painted surface fully reveals itself. 

Like all of her paintings, Gitman's zippered fur representations are rendered from life and in actual scale. They are each based on the same piece of white fur, which the artist poses with different zippers for each work. Before beginning a painting, Gitman meticulously "shapes" the surface of the fur by brushing, disheveling, and arranging the strands of hair to create complex textures and compose patterns of light and shadow. For the artist, this act of arranging and contouring the fur surface is loosely akin to drawing the composition for the work. 

Rich in detail yet set in minimalist compositions, Gitman’s images appear to verge on the abstract when seen from certain vantages, variously evoking painterly white monochromes and rigorous geometric abstraction. The slivers of background that appear behind the zipper openings are resolutely flat, with no color modulations save for the illusionistic shadows cast on it by the zipper teeth. The solidity of the backgrounds contrasts with the subtle textures and soft corporeality of the white fur fields, interrupting the language of realism that Gitman uses to render her foreground subjects. The effect is one of both sensuality and tension, tempting and then withholding the possibility of entry into the pictorial space. 

Victoria Gitman was born in 1972 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her works are held in the public collections of numerous museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, among others. In 2015 she was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Pérez Art Museum, curated by Réne Morales. Other recent solo exhibitions include François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; Garth Greenan, New York; Tomio Koyama, Tokyo; Las Vegas Art Museum; Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles; and Bass Museum of Art, Miami. She lives and works near Miami in Hallandale Beach, Florida.