Jaime Davidovich

Jaime Davidovich (September 27, 1936 – August 27, 2016) was an Argentine-American conceptual artist and television-art pioneer. His innovative artworks and art-making activities produced several distinct professional reputations including painter, installation artist, video artist, Public-access television cable TV producer, activist, and non-profit organizer. He is the creator of legendary downtown Manhattan cable television program The Live! Show (1979–1984). to Lucio Davidovich and Clara Davidovich (née Jacif). His parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine.

Career Visual art Davidovich began exhibiting his paintings in 1956 in Argentina, Brazil, and the United States. Interested in space and texture, he experimented with the boundaries of visual artworks first by dissolving the structure of the painting's frame by affixing canvas to walls and then by installing works directly on walls, floors, stairways, and sidewalks.

Adhesive tape came to figure prominently in Davidovich's work, initially as a means to affix canvas to walls and subsequently as an artistic medium itself; he would go on to exhibit throughout Argentine museums and art galleries, as well as in Iowa, New York, Ohio, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, France, Germany, Iran, Italy and Spain; he resided in New York City until his death. The show also featured commercials for Videokitsch, commercially produced items and art multiples made by Davidovich and others. Of The Live! Show, one critic notes, "Davidovich's humor obviously transcends his medium, resulting in a comment as potent today as one assumes it was in 1972—harnessing new media to capture what is 'real' and 'true' is an artistic act both vitally important and profoundly absurd."

Selected exhibitions In 1991 the American Museum of the Moving Image presented a retrospective of The Live! Show. In 2007 the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Spain added The Live! Show to its collection of video art.

In 2010 Davidovich was honored with a retrospective exhibition at ARTIUM, Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporaneo in Spain.

Other solo exhibitions include Cabinet, Brooklyn, New York; MAMBA: Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires; Vanguardia, Bilbao, Spain; and the American Museum of the Moving Image, New York. Davidovich has participated in a wide range of group exhibitions, at institutions such as J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; 2007 São Paulo Biennial, Brazil; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Long Beach Museum of Art, California; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Recent solo exhibitions have included: "Jaime Davidovich: Monochromes" (Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York, 2018), "Jaime Davidovich: Adventures of the Avant-Garde" (Bronx Museum of Art, 2015), "Museum of Television Culture" (Churner and Churner, New York, 2013), "Wooster Projects" (Churner and Churner, New York, 2012).

Selected work Tape Project, Yellow Tape at Guggenheim Museum in New York (1970/2015) Adhesive Tape Project at University of Iowa (1972) (1972) (1975) – Video (7 min.)

Awards 1975: New York State Council on the Arts, Creative Artists Public Service Program 1978: National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts fellowship 1982: New York State Council on the Arts, Creative Artists Public Service Program 1984: National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts fellowship 1990: National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts fellowship 2013-2014: Joan Mitchell Foundation, Creating A Living Legacy (CALL) artist