College of Architecture + The Arts alumna Victoria Gitman (BFA ’96) is exhibiting her work in a Tokyo space called Tomio Koyama Gallery. Her exhibition, “Victoria Gitman: On the Surface,” runs until Monday, April 14th.
“On the Surface” emphasizes the “concepts of surface and form, flatness and content, opticality and tactility,” as Gitman explains. The works that are included in this exhibition, paintings in oil on board and drawings in graphite on Mylar, depict vintage beaded purses. Gitman says, “The purses are depicted flat on the picture plane, so in a literal sense, the purses are ‘on the surface.’ But the works are also about the surface, with the fictive beaded planes of the purses becoming stand-ins for painting’s material surface.” In addition to this play with surface, the concept of looking is also present in the exhibition. “These crystallized surfaces draw an almost tactile gaze from the viewer,” says Gitman, “so the works are about a kind of haptic gaze that characterizes the pictorial experience.”
Victoria Gitman earned a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting with a minor in Art History from The Florida International University College of Architecture + The Arts, and she graduated through the FIU Honors College. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the David Nolan Gallery in New York, the Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles, the Las Vegas Art Museum, and the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. The work is also in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, among others.
“Victoria Gitman: On the Surface” will run until Monday, April 14th, 2014 at Tomio Koyama Gallery: 2-21-1 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, 150-8510. Free and open to the public.
All images featured provided courtesy of Victoria Gitman and Tomio Koyama Gallery.
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