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Mitchell Algus Gallery 511 West 25 Street, Second Floor New York 10001 tel:212.242.6242

Jaime Davidovich
Television and video works: 1970-2007
December 1- December 29, 2007

The Mitchell Algus Gallery presents an exhibition of video and collage by Jaime Davidovich opening  Saturday December 1 and continuing through Saturday December 29, 2007. A reception for the artist will be held on the day of the opening from 6 to 8 pm. 

In the late 1960s, as excursions between media began to occur in earnest, many artists with backgrounds in painting and sculpture turned to video, performance and conceptual art. As abrupt as these transitions might have seemed, hindsight reveals striking lines of continuity. Thus the early monochromes of the Argentinian painter Jaime Davidovich (b. 1931) develop from precedents established by another Argentinian, Lucio Fontana. Informed by the informel with surfaces Building of adhesive tape, Davidovich's work was inflected with the fortuitous frission of the ready-made. Moving to New York in 1963, Davidovich's paintings evolved into environmental installations; the tape freed from its support, now covering gallery walls, stairways, and ceilings, then moving out into the streets. Collaged plans and photo-documentations of these installations are classics of a now classic 1970s style. Installations were shown at Bykert Gallery and the 197s Whitney Biennial and, in 1974, a feature article appeared in Artforum. 

Davidovich's move from adhesive tae to video tape in the early 1970s was organic and he became a pioneer of the new medium; "From Tapes as Art, To Art on Tapes," as the artist succinctly put it. One of his first videos had the artist methodically covering a TV screen's black and white and snowy states with colored tape, a piece included in the Museum of Modern Art's inaugural exhibition of the new medium, Open Circuit, in 1974. Indeed, an interest in television came naturally to an Argentinian growing up in Buenos Aires in the early 1950s where "When Evita was in power, it was like watching television all the time." This historical context became explicit in Evita: A Video Scrapbook from 1984. Most recently, Davidovich's video documentation of a mid-1970s trip to Queens with Gordon Matta-Clark to explore his "Fake Estates" was part of Matta-Clark's retrospective at the Whitney, as well as "Odd Lots" at White Columns and the Queens Museum.

When cable TV emerged in the mid 1970s Davidovich was one of the first artists to recognize its potential, helping found SoHo Cable in 1976. The next year Davidovich established Artists' Television Network, continuing as its programming director until 1983. During this time he hosted The Live! Show featuring interviews with many prominent artists including John Cage, Vito Accconci and Laurie Anderson. With time, The Live! Show evolved from an interview format to one more parodic and critical; from television looking at artists, to artists looking at television (in the words of Argentinian art historian, Rodrigo Alonso).

In the mid 1990s, Davidovich began making video paintings by projecting real time images onto canvases covered with iridescent paint. Anticipating works by Donald Moffet, Davidovich's painting reimagine movements on the urban peripheries; automobile and ship traffic along the Hudson and east Rivers. The paintings comprise an update on the Hudson River tradition, as the darkling mood recalls the pictorials photographers of the early 20th Century.