Victoria Gitman

Although her work is precisely representational, Gitman’s mature paintings engage the language of abstraction. Her reductive compositions emphasize the formal qualities of the work and evoke abstract painting traditions. In conceptual terms, her work is concerned with notions of femininity, beauty and desire through the lens of art history. In her labor-intensive paintings, Gitman unpacks the performance of femininity and explores humankind's relationship with craftsmanship, and all the gender politics that come with it.

In recent years, Gitman has turned from beaded purses exclusively to fur purses, narrowing in even closer so that the object itself is obscured and the subject is simply colored fur - not a purse. Here, too, there is a fetishistic element as viewers are seduced to approach the diminutive canvases; they expect a tactile experience to result, though that proves impossible. Gitman explains in the catalogue for her 2015 show at Pérez Art Museum Miami, “Perhaps the most challenging transition was from the beaded purses to the fur: the beaded surfaces have structure, solidity, definition—they’re an aggregate of discrete units—whereas fur is supple, amorphous, lush.”

In the early 2000s, Gitman turned away from self portraiture but kept her focus on portraiture of female subjects from western art history. In a series titled "The Beauties," she depicted postcards of female portraits from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. These portraits were diminutive in scale, always the size of a 6 x 4 inch postcard. The way Gitman precisely copied every detail of these portraits gives her work a fetishistic touch, as if she is elevating the objecthood of the original image. Thus, her work falls in line with the tradition of trompe l'oeil painting. Here, too, we see a tension between the old and new; being both gracefully old and yet abruptly new. The series later included several groups of minute drawings in graphite on mylar that reproduce works by artists such as Ingres, Titian and Bronzino. From 2008-2009 she also created a group of oil paintings on panel that reproduce portrait drawings by Ingres, re-creating his graphite lines in oil paint.

Gitman would go on to expand her cast of subjects. By the mid 2000s, she introduced a series of beaded purses, and later expanded her reach to include fur purses as well. Though it may seem that she shifted away from her art historical beginnings, in fact, the roots stayed the same. At thrift stores, she'd select vintage purses whose geometric patterns reminded her of the works od modernist abstract artists. The resulting paintings “converge with various early and mid-20th century painterly traditions: evoking modernist compositional tendencies, the artist aligns her imagery with the picture plane and extends it nearly edge-to-edge within the pictorial field, which has the effect of collapsing recessional space. Gitman buttresses these subtle formal dialogues with modernist abstraction by inserting veiled references to the work of canonical artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Mark Rothko, and Ad Reinhardt.”

While still a student at Florida International University in the late 1990s, Gitman began a series of "self representations" based on canonical paintings from art history. She quoted Edgar Degas, Jacques-Louis David, John Singer Sargent, Bronzino, John William Waterhouse, Georges de la Tour, Caravaggio, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Johannes Vermeer. However, in place of the existing women, she would paint herself, often changing the gaze to lock eyes with the viewer directly. In doing so, she blurred the boundaries between subject (model) and object (painter), original and imitation, the historical male perspective and the contemporary female one.

Gitman was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She relocated to Miami as a teenager in 1987, where she attended Florida International University, completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and Bachelor of Arts in humanities in 1996. She was also a fellow at the Yale Summer School of Art. In 2001, Gitman moved to Hallandale Beach, Florida, where she now lives and works. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited globally in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Miami.

Victoria Gitman is a mid-career Argentine painter currently living in Hallandale Beach, Florida. Her work, though highly figurative, has been linked to minimalist abstract traditions of the 1960s. Working on a small scale, Gitman has worked in several series, always focusing on themes of femininity, beauty, the tradition of craftsmanship, and the history of art, dating back to the fifteenth century. Her subjects have included quotations of portraits by well known artists, self-portraits, jewelry, purses, and, most recently, luxurious swaths of colored fur.

Concurrently with "The Beauties," Gitman decided to further concentrate her focus on the jewelry the women in these portraits were wearing. She would isolate a necklace, or perhaps a brooch, against a plain background. This time, however, her source was not fifteenth century portraiture, but rather thrift shop and antique store finds. Here, explicitly, the compositions were strikingly minimal and repetitive: just a necklace set atop a solid background, forming a simple circular outline. This simplicity is reminiscent of the purity of the abstract modernism trend of the 1960s.