West, London
Victor Man
The Absence That We Are
David ZwirnerDavid Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Victor Man at the gallery's London location. This is the artist's first show with David Zwirner since the announcement of his representation in 2024. Man's paintings elude categorization, revealing varied, nonlinear references to literature, art, and poetry that transform essential elements of the human experience into visionary manifestations of color and form. Centered on the cycle of life and death, the paintings on view depict enigmatic subjects imbued with a kind of sotto voce tonality; these cryptic figures offer complex, layered readings of the fundamental trajectory of existence. Also featured are self-portraits that wield the artist's own likeness as an anchoring force and interrogative witness against the chaos of the world. Deeply intimate yet also divorced from all self-infatuation, these paintings serve as autoreflective testimonies of the individual's journey through time. Silently the child dwelled in nocturnal cave listening in the blue wave of the spring to the ringing of a radiant flower. And the pale figure of the mother stepped out of the decayed wall and sleepwalking she carried the one born into pain in slumbering hands to the garden. And the stars were drops of blood shimmering in the bleak branches of the old tree and they fell in the nocturnal one’s course cloth of hair, and the boy quietly lifted the purple eyelids, the silver forehead sighing in the night wind. Wakening in the evening garden in the quiet shadow of the father, o how frightened this radiant head suffering in blue coolness and the silence in autumn rooms. A golden boat the sun sank at the lonely hill and the earnest treetops fall quiet overhead. Silently the slumbering countenance of the sister encounters in moist blueness, buried in her scarlet-colored hair. Blackish the night followed the other one. What forces to stand so silently on the decayed spiral staircase in the house of the fathers and the flickering candlestick dies in slender hands. Hour of lonely sinisterness, mute awakening in the hallway in the sallow web of the moon. O the smile of evil sad and cold, so that the sleeping woman’s rosy cheek pales. In showers a black linen veiled the window. And a flame jumped out of the other one’s heart and it burned silverly in darkness, a singing star. Silently childhood’s crystalline paths sank in the garden. "Memory (Fragment) [Version 1 of “ Metamorphosis of Evil”]" —Georg Trakl (1887–1914)