Victor Man

Zephir  
@ Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle

With Zephir, Deutsche Bank KunstHalle presents Victor Man's first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. The Romanian painter, recently named Deutsche Bank's "Artist of the Year" 2014, is one of the world's most compelling contemporary artists. Born in Cluj in 1974, he is equally inspired by the ancient and the modern. In his work he concentrates on the development of an autonomous iconography in which frequent literary references intermingle with his own biography. Literature and art history, collective memory and personal experience are the elements woven together by the artist into a non-linear story where distinctions between present and past, fiction, imagination, and reality are abolished. These overlapping of points of reference run throughout all his works, where the fusion of gender, androgyny, or, more generally, the uncertainty of physiognomy and appearance form a recurrent theme that strengthens the image of an identity in perpetual movement and suggests how rich and mysterious the essence of things can be beyond their appearance. At once timeless and visionary, his paintings resist easy interpretation, but rather suggest alternative possibilities of recognition, remembrance, and seeing.

In addition to providing a survey of his works since 2006, Zephir includes a few paintings never previously presented to the public, as well as a stained-glass window created especially for the occasion of this exhibition. LINK Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle