Meyer Vaisman, "In the Vicinity of History, 5774"

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, Meyer Vaisman currently lives and works in Barcelona. Thirty years ago, however, he was a major figure on New York's busy East Village art scene, as coproprietor of International with Monument, a gallery that hosted some of the first shows of such notable figures as Ashley Bickerton, Sarah Charlesworth, Peter Halley, Jeff Koons and Richard Prince. He also frequently showed his own work, a kind of conceptually coded self-portraiture ultimately rooted in his background as a South American Jew of Lithuanian descent. This show, his first in New York since 2000, continues his themes in a series of paintings created with ink-jet printing.