R.H. Quaytman

Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Boston, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Exhibition Guide, Chapter 15, 2009-10

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although there are no magenta undertones in the original and the overall tonality is slightly lighter. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals some minor wear with associated minute and unobtrusive specks of loss to the centre of the upper edge and the upper right corner tip. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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R.H. Quaytman’s subtle interlacing of narrative through a dialogue between images and materials has gained widespread critical acclaim as one of the most interesting artistic practices of recent years. Her intriguing ‘paintings’ of silkscreen images on a wooden surface offer a fascinating self-reflexive perspective not only on the material and representational qualities of the works themselves, but also on how narrative is constructed between the individual works and the wider context of the artist’s exhibitions.

Having faced the harsh reality of an artist’s legacy after her father, the painter Harvey Quaytman, passed away in 2001, she experienced “a growing painful awareness of the fate of most art objects (….) It made me need to take charge of my own output and insert the idea of its ending. Rather than seeing the accumulation of unsold work in a studio as a failure in entering the market or history or whatever, I would make it an element of the project: the collection of my own work” (R.H. Quaytman in conversation with Paulina Pobocha, ‘R.H. Quaytman, Interview with Paulina Pobocha’, Museo Magazine, 2010, online resource). In an attempt to create a context for individual works and a structure for her larger oeuvre, R.H. Quaytman has since 2001 produced her idiosyncratic body of work in individual series, organised according to a linguistic classification. Each series, or chapter, is connected through a unifying theme, in which the individual works are understood as words that create sentences within the chapter, but, like actual words, are also able to exist outside of this initial context.

Exhibition Guide, Chapter 15 (ICA Archive 3, Art For U.S. Embassies) was originally conceived for Quaytman’s exhibition at The Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, where the fifteenth chapter of her work was exhibited in 2009-10. Characteristic of the self-reflexive nature of her oeuvre, the work introduces of a complex set of references: the space for which the exhibition was conceived is shown in the silkscreened archival image of the ICA, and the historical context of the space is referenced through a geometric abstract painting that was once in the Art for U.S. Embassies exhibition. Moreover, similar images are used in the other works from this chapter, weaving a narrative about past exhibitions at the ICA throughout the chapter. On top of these silkscreened images is Quaytman’s signature trompe l’oeil wooden strip that references the material support of the images, as she has always preferred to work on a wooden support that stands apart from the wall at a slight angle. This conflation of the individual work with narratives from the other panels of Chapter 15, the specific space of the ICA and it’s past exhibitions, as well as its own material support make Exhibition Guide, Chapter 15 (ICA Archive 3, Art For U.S. Embassies) a highly characteristic work of R.H. Quaytman’s poetic interlacing of narratives.