David Zwirner is pleased to announce the representation of Victor Man. The gallery will present the painting K (2014) by Man at Art Basel Paris, and a solo exhibition is planned for autumn 2025 at our London gallery.??
Man’s psychologically layered, resolutely enigmatic paintings collapse reality and fiction, past and present. Marked by an elegant spareness and often painted in a palette of dark and atmospheric tones, the artist’s work encompasses portraits of individuals from his milieu, as well as symbolically laden scenes that are cloaked in a shadowed melancholia.
Man’s paintings are frequently characterized by existential themes drawn directly from his own intimate spiritual experiences. Stylistically complex, these compositions elude categorization, often revealing varied, nonlinear references to art history, literature, and poetry, while also maintaining their singular position in contemporary art. The paintings speak to a deep exploration of existence where human and animal, masculine and feminine, often intermingle. As curator Alessandro Rabottini writes, Man’s work resides “in a regime of mutual simultaneity,” which “reveal[s] an osmosis of different identities that open up and complicate the very notion of portraiture. However, what coexists in Victor Man’s practice is not only the different dimensions of time and forms of feeling but also, and above all, the dimensions of human existence … eroticism alongside spirituality, affection alongside its renunciation, and resemblance alongside mystery and estrangement.” Through their overlapping and synchronous interventions of time, place, and feeling, Man’s paintings evoke the elegiac depths of human experience and reverberate with emotional immediacy.
David Zwirner states,
I love Victor Man’s powerful and enigmatic paintings. To me, they are quintessentially European, firmly rooted in the history of Western painting and his deep appreciation for the Renaissance. His paintings remind me of my favorite poetry: fragments coalesce into open-ended narratives, the interiority of his subjects remain mysterious, and through his surprising iconography, he manages to collapse the continuum of time. I’m excited and honored to welcome Victor Man, one of the truly unique voices in contemporary painting, to the gallery.
Victor Man was born in 1974 in Cluj, Romania. His work has been the subject of various solo exhibitions at museums and institutions such as the Städel Museum, Frankfurt (2023); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2022); Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome (2021); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2018); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014); Villa Medici, Rome (2013); and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2009)
Work by Man is held in international institutional collections, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (MUDAM), Luxembourg; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Pinault Collection, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Städel Museum, Frankfurt; and Tate, United Kingdom.
