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Pérez Art Museum Miami

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Victoria Gitman Untitled 2020

Painted from life and rendered in true scale, Victoria Gitman’s hyperrealistic depictions of necklaces, beaded purses, and fur purses exude sensuality while bearing rich conceptual undercurrents. Gitman’s paintings display the technical prowess, optical effects, and meticulous attention to texture and detail associated with classic Western European still-life paintings of prior centuries. At the same time, in a nod to the compositional strategies of early 20th-century modernist abstraction, Gitman compresses recessional space, aligning her imagery with the picture plane and extending it nearly edge to edge. Moreover, Gitman couches her work in an attitude of detached objectivity, which, together with an emphasis on the generic and repetitive, points to later artistic tendencies, such as Minimalism, Pop art, and Conceptualism.  At the heart of this multilayered practice lies a fascination with painting’s ability to generate an optical counterpart to tactile desire. The conspicuous hyper-femininity of Gitman’s chosen imagery underscores the ways in which that desire has been implicitly coded as masculine within the legacies of Western art. This veiled critique of the very act of looking at paintings redoubles the tensions that animate her work, in which tradition vies with contemporaneity, decadence with restraint, humility with ostentation, precision with beauty.
Identification
Title
Untitled
Production Date
2020
Object Number
2020.209
Credit Line
Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with funds provided by PAMM’s Collectors Council, with additional funds provided by Alexander Guest and Camille and Patrick McDowell
Copyright
© Victoria Gitman. Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York
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Physical Qualities
Medium
Oil on board
Dimensions
12 x 12 x 1 inches
Visual Description
Untitled by artist Victoria Gitman is an oil painting on board made in 2020. It measures twelve by twelve inches in size, the dimension of a perfect square and the same size as an average adult’s forearm. Although this painting is an example of realism, which refers to an artwork painted in a highly realistic way, it transcends this description. The artist has painted this object to exact scale from direct observation in such a precise way that a viewer may feel as if they are looking at the object of interest itself, rather than a painted reproduction or even a photograph of it. Untitled is comprised of a two-dimensional image of a high-fashion vintage fur handbag set against a solid tan background. The purse is square-shaped and is in the center of the square composition, closely and evenly bordering its edges. The texture of the object is almost seductive – every hair of fur is painted meticulously so that the audience can imagine the soft fur underneath their skin. The object within the painting is patterned with an allover geometric design that is softened by its fur texture. These triangles, squares, and semi hard-edged shapes are colored in several light and dark mauve tones, lavender, plum, neon pink, black, cream, and a tan color that is similar to its background. The painting itself pulls the audience in with its painstakingly accurate detail and scale of an aesthetically beautiful object.
Victoria Gitman
Victoria Gitman — b.1972, Buenos Aires; lives in Hallandale Beach, Florida
Artist Page