LOS ANGELES, CA.- Victoria Gitman’s deceptively diminutive oil paintings depict closely observed surfaces: dyed furs of vintage handbags, geometric tessellations of sequins or beads, glinting costume jewelry. Each painting is months in the making and a product of deep looking and careful craft, bestowing an auratic quality through a palpable sense of sustained, intimate attention. Sometimes cropped close and sometimes resting on monochromatic surfaces, they carry a visual weight and tactility, luring the viewer into a close proximity where vision and touch begin to merge. "There's something to this painting that escapes capture by the camera, just as much as it escapes capture by language," the critic Barry Schwabsky once noted about her work. "It's painting in the purest sense."

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 (LACMA); 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; 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. Most recently, her paintings were included in La Trienal at El Museo del Barrio, New York. Solo exhibitions of her work include Garth Greenan, New York; Tomio Koyama, Tokyo; Las Vegas Art Museum; David Nolan, New York; Daniel Weinberg, Los Angeles; and Bass Museum of Art, Miami. Gitman is represented by François Ghebaly in Los Angeles and Garth Greenan Gallery in New York. She lives and works near Miami in Hallandale Beach, Florida.

Gitman's solo exhibition Everything is Surface: Twenty Years of Painting is on view at the gallery in Los Angeles through May 7.

Now representing Em Kettner

Em Kettner joyously reimagines the disabled body. Her porcelain and woven thread sculptures, often no bigger than an outstretched hand, depict bodies embracing the power of their smallness and fragility. Figures merge with each other in an interlocking that insists on play and pleasure. They merge with their beds, chairs, canes and hand railings, illuminating the systems of support on which people—both disabled and not—rely. In her hands, even the standard components of exhibition display, like pedestals and frames, become sculptural considerations of physical support and loving care. Kettner's work, charged with talismanic force and brimming with charisma, considers the body's porosity with a vocabulary of nuanced conceptualism and masterful craft.

Em Kettner (b. 1988, Philadelphia, PA) is an artist and writer based in Richmond, CA. Recent solo exhibitions include The Understudies, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; Slow Poke, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; Play the Fool, Goldfinch, Chicago; and The Eternal Worm, Harpy, Rutherford. Kettner’s work has been reviewed and published in ArtForum, Art in America, Contemporary Art Review LA (CARLA), Hyperallergic, and Sixty Inches From Center. She is the recipient of the Wynn Newhouse Award, the MIUSA Women’s Institute on Leadership and Disability, an SAIC Teaching Fellowship, and the 2019-2020 AAC Diversity + Leadership Fellowship. Kettner earned her BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.