Stefanie Victor
July 11–August 25, 2018
Adams and Ollman is pleased to announce an exhibition with the artist Stefanie Victor. As part of the exhibition, there will be a special screening of Geta Brătescu’s 1977 film The Hands. For the eye, the hand of my body reconstitutes my portrait.
On view will be sculptures by Victor that speak directly to the body and the senses of sight and touch in particular, their radiating forms invoking joints, sockets, and axes of motion. At once mechanistic and organic, Victor’s elegant, small-scale sculptures engage the languages of Minimalism and Geometric Abstraction while achieving a specificity of place and sentiment. The forms she creates can be understood through their carefully chosen materials, structure, scale, and modes of display. They reference jewelry, hardware, and everyday objects, inviting a nuanced visual experience that extends across multiple categories and expectations. The works exist in a liminal state where neither function nor identity is rigid. Rather, the sculptures serve as quiet monuments to private experience and the work of the studio — the artist's hands twisting, folding, bending, forming, and shaping materials.
Victor’s new body of work responds loosely to Hands, a black and white film by Romanian artist Geta Brătescu that documents the hands of the artist engaged in a range of activities and movements — smoking a cigarette, tracing lines on her hands, touching the borders of a sheet of paper and then crumpling it up. Filmed from above, the artist’s hands, disembodied, perform a variety of gestures or tasks across the table which becomes the stage for theatricality, imagination, and play. The simple gestures quickly become transgressive in their proposition of using whatever is at one’s disposal — the body and everyday objects, in this case — to make art. Her movements, scripted and precise, become radical and provocative through their ambiguous meanings. Throughout the film, Brătescu’s hands are at once the subject and the agent of her work.
As in Brătescu’s film, Victor’s artistic practice prioritizes intimacy and incorporates the confines of the body, studio, and home to create meaning that perhaps exists in private, performed and made for no one but the artist herself. Tube and dome shapes allude to the corporeal while simultaneously offering entry points and portals for fingers and eyes. Links and strings in some works suggest movement, play, and an invitation to touch despite their silence and stasis as sculptures.The series of wall-mounted sculptures Untitled (eyes for Geta) suggests human eyes as much as keyholes, industrial buttons, cameras, plugs, or more abstract metaphysical portals. These shapes deliberately embody contradictions: they look functional but are essentially ornamental. They are inert, but seem to observe. From a distance, they can appear mysterious or even menacing, but their scale and particularity invite intimacy. They resemble the industrial, and yet each is quite different — textured, imperfect, and handmade. As abstract objects, they play with our perception of space and depth through subtle relationships between surface and void, convexity and concavity, color and its absence.
Stefanie Victor was born in 1982 and lives and works in Queens, New York. She earned a MFA in painting from Yale School of Art in 2009, and a BFA in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. Her work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; Participant, Inc, New York; and the Drawing Center, New York, among others.
A central figure of Romanian contemporary art since the 1960s, Geta Brătescu was born in 1926 in Ploiești, Romania, and lives and works in Bucharest. She studied at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy and at the Fine Arts Academy in Bucharest and worked as an artistic director for the magazine Secolul 20 (20th Century), renamed Secolul 21. Recent solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2018); Camden Arts Centre, London (2017 - traveled to MSK Gent); Documenta 14, Neue Galerie, Kassel (2017); La Biennale di Venezia, Romanian Pavilion, Venice (2017); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2016); Tate Liverpool (2015); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2015); and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2014), among others. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at International Center of Photography, New York (2018); Documenta 14, Athens (2017); Vargas Museum Manila (2016); Kyiv Biennial 2015; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (organized in collaboration with Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, 2015); Menil Collection, Houston (2015 - traveled to Hammer Museum, Los Angeles); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015); and Musée d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2013), among others. In 2008, she was awarded the title Doctor Honoris Causa from the National University of Arts, Bucharest, for her contribution to the advancement of contemporary Romanian art.
installation view: Stefanie Victor
installation view: Stefanie Victor
installation view: Stefanie Victor
installation view: Stefanie Victor
installation view: Stefanie Victor
installation view: Stefanie Victor
installation view: Stefanie Victor
installation view: Stefanie Victor
installation view: Stefanie Victor
installation view: Stefanie Victor
installation view: Stefanie Victor
installation view: Stefanie Victor
Stefanie Victor
Untitled (you), 2017
copper, vitreous enamel, paint
3/4 x 12 x 4 1/2 inches
SVic_201703
Stefanie Victor
Untitled (eyes for Geta I), 2016
white bronze, nickel, paint, brass and copper tubing
3 1/2 x 4 1/2 x 2 inches
SVic_201601
Stefanie Victor
Untitled (eyes for Geta III), 2017
oxidized brass and bronze, stone, copper tubing
3 1/2 x 4 1/2 x 2 inches
SVic_201702
Stefanie Victor
Untitled (hands for Geta 1), 2017
copper and silver
2 x 7 x 4 1/2 inches
SVic_201705
Stefanie Victor
Untitled (hands for Geta II), 2017
stoneware, edition of 5, 1 AP
two linked components, each 1 3/4 x 1 3/4 x 1 3/4 inches
SVic_201706
Stefanie Victor
Untitled (spine I), 2018
bronze and epoxy with steel pins
8 components, each 2 1/2 x 1 1/2 x 1 1/2; dimensions variable
SVic_201801
Stefanie Victor
Untitled (me), 2017
silver and vitreous enamel
1/2 x 12 x 2 inches
SVic_201704
Geta Brătescu
Les Mains. Pentru ochi, mâna trupului meu îmi reconstituie portretul (The Hands. For the eye, the hand of my body reconstitutes my portrait), 1977
8mm-film transferred onto DVD, 4:3, no sound, black and white, Camera: Ion Grigorescu
04:55 minutes
Courtesy of the artist, Ivan Gallery and Hauser & Wirth
GBratescu 01