Victor Pimstein

VICTOR PIMSTEIN (Mexico City, 1962).
"Leaded 2", 1997.
Oil on panel.
Signed and titled on the back.
Measurements: 25 x 19 cm.
Victor Pimstein Ratinoff graduated from Harvard (MA in Architecture) and Columbia (BA in Comparative Literature). He has exhibited his pictorial and photographic work extensively in galleries and museums in Europe and America. After residing in Boston, Montpellier, New York, Rome and Mexico City, he currently lives in Barcelona. He has been invited to give lectures and workshops at the MACBA in Barcelona (Public Fictions, 2010), Elisava de Bcn, International University of Catalonia and Harvard, among other universities. Monographs have been published on his work: "Ideal Landscape", Joan Prats Gallery, Barcelona, 2003; "Commonplaces", The Blue Gallery, London, 2003, among others. He has been reviewed in numerous publications. To mention a few: Victoria Combalía, "Víctor Pimstein" in "Barcelone 1947-2007", Fondation Maeght, Saint Paul de Vence; Daniel Giralt-Miracle, "La mirada indagatoria de Víctor Pimstein", ABC Cultural, 22 March 1996; Francesc Miralles, "Víctor Pimstein", Barcelona, La Vanguardia, 12 November 1991. He has held several solo exhibitions in the Barcelona gallery Joan Prats and in the London gallery The Blue Gallery. He has participated in fairs such as the London Art Fair, successive editions of ARCO (with J.Prats), MACO (with Alejandro Sales), Art Basel... He is represented in public and private collections: La Caixa, Fund.Televisa, Sorigué, Banco de España... Nobody better than the artist himself explains the motivations of "Commonplaces": "it was born from an attempt to define "my" landscape, the confines of my own identity, the line that separates my being from others and the present from my past (...) When one has moved from place to place, from language to language and from culture to culture, the natural continuity between personal and social identity is fractured. This fracture brings to light the artificiality behind the construction of "landscape" (...) Beginning to explore my memory of place, I was confused by the fact that very few of the images presented to me corresponded to memories of my direct experience (...) When thinking about the relationship between landscape and pleasure, the saturated turquoise of beach postcards appeared; when imagining a primordial and epic landscape, images from Western movies appeared (...) Thinking about the generosity of the landscape, I was confused by the fact that the images I was presented with did not correspond to memories of my direct experience (...) Thinking about the relationship between landscape and pleasure, the saturated turquoise of beach postcards appeared; imagining a primordial and epic landscape presented the images of Western movies (...)....) Thinking of the generosity and benevolence of the earth brought me fragments of ceramics and pastoral textiles (...) thinking of an intimate landscape gave me the impressionist garden (...) These images of collective memory are my flag and my country" (from the catalog of the exhibition "Commonplaces", Blue Gallery, London 2003).