Meyer Vaisman: In The Vicinity Of History, 5777

MEYER VAISMAN In The Vicinity of History, 5777 May 23 – July 3, 2014 | 11 Rivington St & 195 Chrystie St, NY

Eleven Rivington is very pleased to present Venezuelan-born Jewish artist Meyer Vaisman’s first solo exhibition in New York since 2000.  The show will feature new large-scale inkjet paintings on poplar plywood and is on view at both gallery locations at 11 Rivington Street and at 195 Chrystie Street from May 23 – June 27, 2014.  Vaisman has been living and working in Barcelona for the last 14 years and effectively returns in full with this exhibition, as well as a forthcoming solo institutional exhibition at Portikus in early 2015, organized by Stadelschule director Philippe Pirotte.  His work is currently included in the museum exhibition Permission to be Global at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on view through July 13, 2014.

Vaisman returns to New York with a new series that reflects on his own practice of the past 28 years, while forging a new and concentrated exploration on ideas of self-representation through a coded abstraction. Since the mid-1980s, Vaisman has sought to create paintings without his hand or touch, and his earliest works employed mechanical techniques and commercial process inks. He continues his interest in photomechanical reproduction and its transformation into digital printing, employing the most current available technologies and creating inkjet paintings on industrial plywood. Where the artist previously zoomed in on the canvas weave of a picture's surface, these new works draw our attention to the back, wooden stretcher bars of a painting: everything is inside out, back to front, upside down, and mirror-imaged. The primary motif in this exhibition is Vaisman's own signature. While a signature is the smallest gestural mark one makes on a daily basis, it is rendered useless and impersonal by repetition.  The artist’s early works articulated the displacement of actual painting by simulated and reproduced imagery; his new paintings investigate the idea of self as subject through the deployment, repetition, and layering of his own autographic mark or thumb print.

Meyer Vaisman was born 1960 in Caracas, Venezuela and studied at Parson School of Design, NY.  He founded the now legendary artist run gallery International With Monument in the East Village in 1984, showcasing the work of Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Ashley Bickerton, Sarah Charlesworth, Robert Smithson, and Peter Halley, among others.  Vaisman made his solo debut in 1986 at White Columns and has exhibited regularly and internationally.  Vaisman’s exhibitions include Jay Gorney Modern Art, NY; Sonnabend Gallery, NY; Leo Castelli, NY; 303 Gallery, NY; Mario Diacono, Boston; Patrick Painter, Inc., LA; Daniel Templon, Paris; Akira Ikeda, Tokyo; and Waddington Galleries, London, among others; his last solo gallery exhibition in NY was in 2000 at Gavin Brown’s enterprise.  Vaisman’s work has been included in the Venice Biennale (2003) and The Carnegie International (1988) as well as notable exhibitions, including East Village USA at New Museum, NY (2004); Almost Warm and Fuzzy: Childhood and Contemporary Art at PS1, NY; No Place (Like Home) at The Walker Art Center, MN (1997); and Post Human, curated by Jeffrey Deitch, at The Deste Foundation, Athens (1992, traveled).  His work is included in numerous museum collections, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Walker Art Center, MN; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; La Galeria de Art Nacional, Caracas; MOCA Los Angeles; The Broad Foundation; The Hammer Museum, LA; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and The Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv.