GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo will present the exhibition On relative loneliness from 19 March to 18 May 2008, dedicated to the works of the Romanian artist Victor Man. This will be Man’s first exhibition mounted in a museum and it will be accompanied by a complete monograph on his work.
The exhibition, which is curated by Alessandro Rabottini, is part of the Eldorado series, GAMeC’s project room that focuses on the most interesting up-and-coming artists on the international scene.
Victor Man won international renown when his work was presented in the Romanian pavilion at the last Venice Biennale. The event confirmed the validity of his art, which, in just a few years, has established him as one of the most intense and singular young artists on the international scene.

The means Victor Man uses are principally painting, sculpture, photography, printing and wall painting. Using these tools he builds installations in which few and mysterious elements are orchestrated in intimate yet powerful spatial compositions in which the motif of memory intertwines with themes such as personal history, collective narrations, the detritus of the ideologies of the past, eroticism, power, the fragility of human existence, desire and the feeling of loss.

The objects and images that he uses in his installations come from a more or less recent past. They are objets trouvés that have been removed from the passage of time, and images taken from magazines, books or websites that, detached also from their original context, take on new values and stimulate new narrations. The world of Victor Man is at times dark, in which reflections on the feeling of belonging and the nature of political and national identity overlay a more general contemplation of the human condition, melancholy, the violence of existence, and solitude.

For GAMeC the artist has created three new installations in which painting, sculpture, light box, photography and objets trouvésgenerate a powerfully suggestive experience. The whole exhibition is an account told in subtle tones – at times dreamlike, at others disturbing – on the senses of loss and death, obsession, the dimension of desire as fetishism and eroticism. As in all his exhibitions, in this one too the poetry of the contents has a dual sense: parallel to the sphere of the subjects of the works, Man creates a formal alphabet through which he gives a discourse on the ciphers of pictorial representation and the possibility of visual communication. As always happens in his work, each work is part of a wider architecture of meanings and symbols, within which the subtle relationship between objects and images provides a sort of “cinematic” rhythm while still remaining unclear. This restrained body of works evokes the conflict between a primitive and almost bestial dimension of existence and the unspoken violence of cultural civilisation. The viewer is thus confronted with images of belief, libido and possession.

The exhibition will have a monographic catalogue that will document a large portion of his artistic output. Published by JRP I Ringier as part of the series “First Monograph”, and edited by Alessandro Rabottini (exhibition curator), the catalogue contains texts by Yilmaz Dziewior, Director of the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Tom Morton, critic and independent curator, and Alessandro Rabottini, Curator at GAMeC. The catalogue will be completed by a conversation between Victor Man and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of the Serpentine Gallery in London.