2023-10-25 17:46:34
You have rarely seen such green. Not that kind of blue either. The accents on “Portrait of A. with My Left Ear” appear electric, glowing from within the image like a piece of plastic from the bottom of a musty pond. Such pictures have rarely been seen at all.
There is much that is remarkable about this exhibition by Victor Man at the Städel Museum. It starts with the location. The Städel has hung the solo exhibition in the middle of its Old Masters collection, where the landscape paintings of the old Dutch are usually gathered.
But Victor Man is not an old Dutchman at all, he was born in 1974 and comes from Romania. More precisely, from Cluj in Transylvania. He maintains studios there and in Berlin, but prefers to stay away from the metropolis’ art world spectacle. He doesn’t even come to his own openings, and he certainly doesn’t give any interviews. Nothing, as the curator of the Städel show, Svenja Grosser, explains, should distract from his work. And that’s literally being ripped out of his hands.
Victor Man, „Girl in Love With a Wound“, 2020/21
Source: © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023/Photo: Stefan Korte Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Neu, Berlin
It’s not just that Victor Man likes to keep his works to himself. The works of art that the painter sells to the lucky chosen ones through his well-known galleries are, once they end up there, traded on the secondary market at astonishing prices. Where ten years ago you could become a collector for five-figure sums, fortunes are now being spent on individual works. In June 2023, the 130 by 120 centimeter painting “Interior of the World,” painted in 2017, was auctioned at Christie’s auction house for 1.7 million British pounds – with an estimate of 100,000 to 150,000 pounds.
Rare and mysterious: Victor Man
“Victor Man,” advertises the Städel Museum, “has been considered one of the most sought-after and at the same time rarest contemporary artists for years.” But what exactly makes him so sought-after? On the one hand, there is the painting itself. Man’s canvases are mostly kept in muted, dark colors. It takes time to adjust to your lighting conditions – it’s a bit like entering a darkened room.
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The copper fittings on furniture or the beads embroidered on the jacket of a dark-haired lady look all the more shimmering. Modern smartphones fail at playback, and that’s sometimes really exciting. The blue of the embroidery on a piece of clothing, the greenish complexion of the people the artist recruits from his close environment, the red hair and the green leaves.
Most of the protagonists look mysteriously into nothingness, except for “Girl in Love With a Wound,” which also adorns the exhibition poster. This amazingly present girl drills her gaze into the viewer while lying down, embedded in organic, enigmatic shapes. Victor Man paints himself as a mask-like brooding figure, and as a bright shadow in front of the melancholy portrait of his father, which shines here and there like tropical fish.
Victor Man, „Self as the Man of Sorrows“, 2021
Source: © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023, Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Neu Photo: Stefan Korte
These portraits are small universes within themselves in which nothing is left to chance. Victor Man, we learn, sometimes works on a picture for a very long time until everything is in his mind. So that’s the appeal of this art. Another is the “variously interwoven quotations”, the “influences of the Trecento and Quattrocento”, the echoes of symbolism and New Objectivity, which are repeatedly highlighted in Man exhibition catalogs.
There’s no question: Romanian people love quotes. He often includes references to long-dead painters and writers in the titles of his works. In 2021’s “Girl with Goya’s Scull (Memorable Equinox),” a naked woman lies on her back on a stool, arms folded above her head, cuddling a skull. Goya appears in the title, his “Naked Maya” is one of the most famous nudes in art history. And then Francisco de Goya repeatedly addressed death, madness and violence, back at the time of the Napoleonic Wars more than 200 years ago.
Timeless objectivity
In Victor Man’s death there is nothing threatening or gruesome; it is an atmospheric quote from the wellspring of literature and art history. Everything seems incredibly coherent, precious, strange and strange. But does this art really challenge you? Does she take risks? None of the paintings enter into a dialogue with contemporary art, or with the present at all. This distinguishes him from the quoted masters.
There is a decidedly timeless atmosphere; the clothes and hairstyles of the protagonists could come from the 1930s, the mask-like faces have something of the New Objectivity, without, like the works of the 20s and 30s, reflecting the vibrations in society their time. Victor Man remains in his studio, in the web of his idiosyncratic references.
Untitled painting by Victor Man from 2013
Source: © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023 Photo: def image, Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Max Hetzler
As much as he hides from the public as an artist, he makes it very clear to the public what references he has. He likes to paint mysterious images into the picture. The Polynesian mask in the background of “The Chander with Gauguin’s Evil Spirit” is a direct copy from a painting by Paul Gauguin.
The astonishing canvas “Untitled (Connaissez-vous des Esseintes?)” with the slightly oversized head of the lady portrayed from 2015 poses a mystery: Is this woman holding the back of a chair or a Maori cutting weapon made of jade? The chestnut blossoms in the background have something tropically sinister, even though they grow in the painter’s garden in Central Europe.
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Justification of terror
Des Esseintes, in turn, is the main character in a novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans from 1884, which summed up the concept of decadence of the fin de siècle. But today it is also a topos that has been worked through and worked through in literary history. Just like Hölderlin’s poem “An Zimmern” from 1812, which gives the exhibition its title, is not exactly a new discovery. Is this art one?
Städel also has a Man painting in the collection
For Victor Man, “Lines of Life” is the second institutional solo exhibition in Germany. He was Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year” in 2014, and for his Berlin show he had the rooms architecturally redesigned in line with his vision. This wasn’t necessary in Frankfurt, the muted blue-grey of the walls and the dark stone floor match the colors of the paintings perfectly.
Man added the Städel to his collection in 2020, the money for this came from the Städel Museum Association (and the prices were still affordable). The small-format “Study for the Grimace of Tenderness” is not hanging in the exhibition, but in the basement of the museum, with the contemporaries, in the middle of canvases by Miriam Cahn, Georg Baselitz, Daniel Richter and Marwan.
View of Victor Man’s exhibition in the Städel in Frankfurt
Source: Städel Museum/Norbert Miguletz/© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023
It is explained to you that they deliberately left a distance from the other pictures so that Man’s mysterious fine painting could unfold better. That is understandable. But is it a good sign in the end? Everyone has to decide that for themselves.
One thing is certain: you will see a beguiling painting exhibition if you go to Frankfurt now, because Victor Man’s art is one that you definitely enjoy looking at. Unfortunately, it’s also one with which you can’t argue about anything. Like Jean des Esseintes, people have retreated too much into their own realm for that.
“Victor Man. The lines of life”until February 4, 2024, Städel Museum, Frankfurt/Main
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