JAIME DAVIDOVICH: TAPED PROJECTS
Opening reception Thursday April 26, 6-9 pm
Exhibition runs until May 26. Tuesday to Saturday 11-6 pm.
Henrique Faria Fine Art is proud to present works from the 1960s and 1970s by Jaime Davidovich. The work Taped Project, first shown at the Akron Museum in 1972, will be recreated in the gallery together with sketches and drawings from that series of works created between 1970 and 1974 in several cultural institutions throughout the United States. Furthermore, the video installation Blue, Red and Yellow (1974), as well as photo collages from the 1970s, will also be exhibited. Concurrently, a selection of Davidovich’s video production between 1972 and 1975 will be projected.
In the early 1960s, Jaime Davidovich created paintings with a strong emphasis on surface and matter embracing the movement of Informalism, which proposed an abstraction that focused on texture, color and gesture.
Davidovich’s early paintings were purposely not framed but attached to the exhibition walls with tape, breaking the boundaries that the frame imposes on the work. This practice reveals his early interest in encompassing spectator and space as integral parts of his work, an interest he acquired from Lucio Fontana and Spatialism.
Having moved from Buenos Aires to New York in 1963, Davidovich continued his research on support and space and how they relate to the spectator. This investigation led him to start working directly with tape as an artistic material, creating textured surfaces by applying different kinds of tapes to the space. The series of Taped Projects was born, which developed into many site-specific works, including his installation at the Akron Art Institute in Ohio in 1972 and his participation in the Whitney Biennial the following year.
The repetitive application of tape reveals the performative characteristic of these pieces. The spectator, as an active viewer, reconstructs the creative process in his mind while observing the work. The participation of the spectator was also emphasized in the scale these works could acquire, at times inhabiting different walls, and in the case of the Whitney Project, going through the floors of the museum’s building. Thus, the visitor could only understand and engage the totality of the piece through his actual movement around the space.
By the end of the decade, Davidovich started experimenting with a new kind of tape that was becoming widely accessible: videotape. This would become the medium for which Davidovich would gain notoriety in the art scene, especially through his work with media and television, creating projects such as Cable SoHo, Artist Television Network and The Live! Show, where he would satirize the media, art and society through his alter ego Dr. Videovich.
As a culmination of the Taped Projects, the video installation Blue, Red and Yellow (1974) presented three simultaneous videos of the artist taping television screens with red, blue and yellow, the primary colors in painting, as opposed to the primary colors of video: red, blue and green. The performative element of the Taped Projects was then made explicit and performance became a central part of the work. Thus, two aspects of the artist’s work are merged, that of the painter and the video maker.
Aimé Iglesias Lukin
Jaime Davidovich was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1936. Educated at the National College in Buenos Aires, Argentina; the University of Uruguay; and the School of Visual Arts in New York, Davidovich has widely exhibited at museums and galleries in the US and internationally in Iran, Spain, Brazil, Cuba, Argentina, Colombia, Belgium, Italy, France, and Germany.
He began to exhibit his work towards the end of the 1950s at the Lirolay Gallery, as well as other venues in Argentina. In 1962 he took part in the Premio Ver y Estimar in Buenos Aires and one year later was given a grant to travel to New York where he studied at the School of Visual Arts. At the end of the seventies, his work became more environmental, a transition that gave origin to the Taped Projects. Under the auspices of EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology), he carried out a collection of works in which he replaced canvases with adhesive tapes. In 1973, Davidovich was invited to participate in the Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art. His experiments with tapes originated the project Tape as Art/Art on Tape, in which Davidovich proposed to confront the experiences produced by these two heterogenic mediums. Meanwhile, throughout the decade, he created a collection of videos: Road (1972); Blue, Red, Yellow (1974); Baseboard (1975), 3 Mercer Street (1975) and La Patria Vacía (1975), Interior (1976) and Two Windows (1976). These videos enabled him not only to exhibit in some of the most important cultural spaces in the United States, but also to receive grants from The National Endowment for the Arts and The New York State Council on the Arts, among others. In 1976, together with other artists, he founded Cable Soho and served as its first program director. One year later, he became a founding member of the Artists Television Network (ATN), an institution aimed at promoting television artists and their work, where he served as the director between 1977 and 1983.
In 1984, he returned to videoart and embraced a style that was more explicitly political with his creation of Evita: A Video Scrapbook, an investigation of the historical and mythical figure Eva Perón, to whom he would return in 1990 with Eva Perón, Then and Now. Since then, he has produced video installations that articulate past preoccupations and current concerns in relation to the phenomenon of global culture. He has had two retrospectives: one in 1991 in the American Museum of the Moving Image, New York, and the other in 2010, at Artium Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. In 2012, he was awarded a grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
In parallel to this exhibition, Davidovich will exhibit a selection of his video works at "MediaNoche", an alternative space in East Harlem.