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In 1958, at age 22, Jaime Davidovich traveled from his native Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro for an exhibition of his paintings. He had studied with European teachers of the post-cubist tradition, and his early work was constructed within the boundaries and limitations of that tradition. It was while in Rio that Davidovich first was exposed to the work of the abstract expressionists. His confrontation with that work, particularly with the paintings of Mark Rothko, enabled him to free himself from the European influence and to begin to create an art that would relate more immediately to his own experience. From this early influence developed the concerns of Davidovich's mature work.

Davidovich, however, was not entirely unprepared for the work of the Native American painters. Like many of his Argentinian contemporaries, and like several of the abstract expressionists, he had taken a strong interest in Oriental philosophy and art and had been particularly impressed by the representation of space through the use of "vacuums" in Chinese and Japanese landscape scrolls. Rothko's painting, with its large, minimally defined fields, seemed to him to be almost a modern equivalent