Jaime Davidovich

Jaime Davidovich, a video and installation avant-garde artist born in Buenos Aires and based in New York died at 79 years old in his home in Manahattan on August 30th. Davidovich studied at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, the University of Uruguay, and New York's School of Visual Arts. Prior to video and television, Davidovich was a painter exploring texture and surface in his canvases (e.i: Pizarrónes Negros series). "What I wanted to do was to capture an instant in painting that does not have a beginning or an end," he later said. "When I began to work with video this translated into the delimiting of a frame for something that keeps moving but never ends."* He moved to New York in 1964, and in 1976, helped found Cable SoHo and, in 1978, founded and was president of the Artists' Television Network. These platforms for the distribution of avant-garde thinking and programming via cable access was a way of "get[ting] out of the claustrophobic traditional art world," Davidovich told the New York Times in 1979. He was also the creator of Cable Soho's The Live! Show, a variety half-hour hosted by the artist's alter ego "Dr. Videovich," that ran from 1979 to 1984. The Live! Show featured projects and performances from artists such as Laurie Anderson, John Cage and theatre director Michael Foreman. Davidovich received grants from the NEA (1978, 1984, 1990) and the New York State Council on the Arts (1975, 1982). He was also the Joan Mitchell Foundation's "Creating a Living Legacy Artist" from 2013–14. He was represented by Henrique Faria Fine Art and in 2010 he was given a retrospective at ARTIUM, the Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporaneo in Spain. He had solo exhibitions at a number of New York galleries and institutions, such as the Bronx Museum of Art; the American Museum of the Moving Image, and has participated in group exhibitions at New York's MoMa, the Whitney Biennial (1973); the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; the Long Beach Museum of Art; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. He is survived by two sisters, Leda Davidovich and Celia Nesis; two daughters, Nina Litvak and Carla Davidovich; and five grandchildren. *Source: NYTimes http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/31/arts/television/jaime-davidovich-artist-whose-videos-bypassed-the-gatekeepers-of-culture-dies-at-79.html?_r=0 Artforum http://artforum.com/news/id=63158