R.H. Quaytman

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:45:23 -0400

Exhibitions/2010Biennial/RHQuaytman

R. H. Quaytman’s paintings to date, which are organized into chapters, can be seen as an ongoing archive in which each new painting or series is informed by what came before it. A single image or event acts as a starting point for each chapter. For example, Distracting Distance, Chapter 16, which was specifically conceived for the Biennial, references the Whitney’s building and history. The central motif is the Marcel Breuer–designed window in this space, which appears in Quaytman’s restaging of the Museum’s Edward Hopper painting A Woman in the Sun (1961). The artist K8 Hardy stands in for the woman in the sun. Silkscreened optical patterning attunes viewers to the physical act of perception, while trompe l’oeil depictions of the panel’s edges remind the viewer that the paintings are physical objects rather than simply images. In the artist’s words, “I seek to maintain and simultaneously disrupt painting’s absolute presence.” Quaytman allows these contradictory attitudes toward painting to emerge and reverberate across this carefully installed exhibition space.

Whitney Museum of American Art: Recent pages: Exhibitions/2010Biennial/RHQuaytman

R.H. Quaytman