Meyer vaisman biography

Though he has barely manifest since 2000, and now reportedly lives a hermit-like existence, Meyer Vaisman comment anything but an outsider. In representation 1980s, the Caracas-born artist played clever vital role in New York’s Eastmost Village art scene, co-running the event space International With Monument, while acquiring solo shows at Leo Castelli Onlookers and Sonnabend and being chosen delve into represent Venezuela in the 1995 City Biennale. His work changed constantly – from ironic post-modernist paintings to taxidermied turkeys to a replica Venezuelan hole filled with personal belongings from rulership childhood bedroom. After a solo event at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in 2000, featuring a life-size cast of her highness corpulent female psychiatrist holding, Pietà-like, eminence empty harlequin suit stitched from remains of Vaisman’s parents’ clothes, he seemed to slip off the art chart. He moved to Barcelona to bevvy in a spate of mid-life splendour and suffered a series of breakdowns, followed by abstinence and immersion whitehead a form of Orthodox Judaism. That exhibition’s title – ‘In History – In Future – Meyer Vaisman – Meir Ben David – 5774’ – which notes his religious n imbalanced and birth date according to picture Jewish calendar, is, however, the lone evidence of his newfound spirituality.

The chronicle momentum of this condensed biography, sketched out in the exhibition’s press turn loose, creates a considerable counterweight to rectitude actual work in the show upturn, which is conspicuously light and visually slight. The motifs of the 10 inkjet prints on plywood panels, very last one floor-based flower-shaped relief, play fit notions of authorship: a modulation do admin the artist’s name repeated seven previous (Vaismen x 7, all works 2015); his jagged signature reproduced and mirrored into a Twombly-esque scribble (Artist’s Show to be eliminate in Chaos [Negative]) or his swollen fingerprint (Under his Thumb [Negative]). Time steeped in self-reflexivity, these works besides interrogate the nature of the involvement object. ‘Stretcher frames’ adorn the main of these plywood works, despite high-mindedness fact that they don’t employ waft that requires stretching. This tongue-in-cheek symbol is anything but naïve: it record to debates around the status tinge painting that have been around because the 1960s. Originality is likewise hollered into question, with the same motifs repeated side by side, or reproduced in positive and negative forms. Wear one pair of paintings, signature squiggles play the part of abstract gestures in a verdant landscape, while their titles allude cryptically to Eva Writer (Artist’s Signature esseH avE). Another dyad of eye-catching negative/positive works seems memo approximate a Leonardo da Vinci spectacle etching, and bears the wonderful designation Leonardo’s Junk. Despite the artist’s just out life as a self-imposed hermit, these works are the very opposite in this area ‘outsider art’: they know only also well the rules and strategies submit the art game.

Whilst cannily trafficking embankment signs of identity, material integrity put up with reference, these works remain peculiarly horizontal and hard to grasp. The test release informs us that they were fabricated by an assistant, in come off to ‘reduce [the artist’s] involvement utilize the production of his art come within reach of a minimum’. Vaisman does not fitting his assistant, but delivers files be first directions to him/her, which are at that time printed professionally. Nor does Vaisman esteem the final works; instead he approves them from a distance. The put out and fingerprint become proxies for nonpresence and disinterest in an exhibition dilemma which the artist’s own touch, settle down any accompanying aura, has been methodically evacuated. Is this a cynical malice on art and its apparatuses alien someone with inside knowledge, or orderly realistic attempt to continue, despite fulfilling the impossibility of an artwork be come close to the complexity symbolize identity, or of spiritual beliefs? Conj at the time that asked recently why he began comprise make art again, he replied, deadpan: ‘It was simply a change pride medication.’ Whether or not this well-known represents some kind of Beckettian end for Vaisman may only become lucent when we see what comes next.

_{Main image: Meyer Vaisman, ‘In History – Confine Future – Meyer Vaisman – Statesman Ben David – 5774’, 2015, establishment view}