Purgatorio
Michael Gittes
November 4, 2020 - January 19, 2021

HELLO AND WELCOME TO PURGATORIO
PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING:
NO ONE IS ALONE
FIND MUSIC IN THE AIR
LISTEN, CLOSELY, IT’S EASY TO SEE
WE PLAY IN A SYMPHONY
HEARTS BEAT
ENJOY THE SHOW

Dinner Gallery (formerly VICTORI + MO) is proud to present Purgatorio, a new project by Michael Gittes. Combining his practices in video and painting, Purgatorio is an interactive new media installation opening on November 4th, 2020, marking the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. 

Borrowing its title from Dante’s Divine Comedy, Purgatorio debuts a series of video works continued out of Gittes’ participation in a 2018 exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery. There are nine video works powered by DVD players, each on meticulously reconstructed televisions. Our experience in the space begins with an introduction read by Hollywood icon Elliott Gould, and the viewers then assume control of the show for as long as they desire. Our senses are submerged in familiar territories -- navigating an old technology, unearthing the words to a favorite song, seeing an iconic music video -- which are eerily in sync with the movements on-screen. 

The videos range from Cyd Charisse and The Nicholas Brothers to BTS, and the television figures dance to Selena, Sam Cooke and Rachmaninoff. Accompanying each video is a painting depicting lyrics floating in outer space from the removed songs on the screens below. In harnessing the beautifully mathematical ways that tempos of audio and visual harmonize, the result is a full sensory experience that begs a deeper examination of authorship, memory, and new modes of painting.

This exhibition was created in collaboration with Eli Bronner Fine Art.

About Michael Gittes
Michael Gittes, who works across painting and video, was born in Los Angeles and is currently based there. Gittes graduated from Wesleyan University and went directly into the advertising business. One year later, in 2011, he began building his painting practice. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Park Avenue Armory (New York 2013) and The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ Koreas 2014), as well as in a major group exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery (London 2018), Grand Palais (Paris 2018), Bundeskunsthalle (Bonn 2019), and EMMA Espoo Museum of Modern Art (Helsinki, Finland 2020). This past summer, Gittes painted and sent an original canvas to each of the 1,800 workers at Brooklyn’s Interfaith Medical Center to thank them for their service in the pandemic. Titled “Strangers to No One,” his gift was widely covered in the U.S. and abroad.