Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Victor Man. Evoking literary and cultural references, historical moments, and personal history, Man proposes new connections between seemingly unrelated images, objects, and events, to create works that break with the traditional linear nature of composition. Drawing on notions of myth, legend, and imagination, Man explores the impact of the passage of time on personal and historical narratives to create new aesthetic modes of encountering and understanding the present.

Among the works included in the exhibition are a series of portraits inspired by James Joyce’s protagonist Stephen Dedalus from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Man became interested in developing work that grew out of literature – an art form with which he feels his own practice is closely aligned – in an effort to allow his work to be liberated from the present moment, and to have a larger framework for his work to exist within. In these works Man explores the androgyny of Dedalus, portraying him in scenes drawn both from Joyce’s novel and also with references to earlier art historical and biblical figures. Adopting a Joycean style of narration for his own work, Man has created nonlinear compositions that draw simultaneously on the past and the present.

Victor Man was born in 1974 and lives in Rome and Cluj, Romania. He has been the subject of a number of solo exhibitions at museums world wide including: Centre international d'art et du paysage, Ile de Vassiviere, France; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy; and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England. Man has also been included in a number of group exhibitions including: “Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art” curated by Aspara DiQuinzio, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; La Triennale, “Intense Proximity,” Palais de Tokyo, Paris; “Tanzimat,” Augarten Contemporary, Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria; “Whose (His)story,” Kunstverein, Hamburg, Germany; “Back to Black,” Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany; “Art Focus 5,” International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Jerusalem; and “Reframing,“  CCA, Andratx/Mallorca, Spain. His work was also exhibited in the Romanian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, the 2nd Prague Biennial, and the 2008 Busan Biennial.