‘The boy quietly lifted the purple eyelids,’ reads a quotation by the 20th-century Austrian poet Georg Trakl, included in the accompanying text for Victor Man’s exhibition at David Zwirner, London, ‘the silver forehead sighing in the night wind.’ This palette – nocturnal, expressionistic – chimes with that of Man’s paintings, where figures often have a green cast, appearing by turns luminous and nauseous, as if captured beneath a sick moon. In one striking canvas, Maternity with Legend (2024), an infant swaddled in white seems to rest on the lap of a woman in a bright orange blouse. The child has closed its eyes. Is it sleeping? Or is it, as the grey-green pallor of its skin suggests, dead?
Victor Man, Council of the Rats, 2025 (detail)