I seek to maintain and simultaneously disrupt painting’s absolute presence.
— R. H. Quaytman
R. H. Quaytman approaches painting as if it were poetry: when reading a poem, one notices particular words, and how each is not just that one word, but other words as well. Quaytman’s paintings, organized into chapters structured in the form of a book, have a grammar, a syntax, and a vocabulary. While the work is bounded by a rigid structure on a material level—appearing only on beveled plywood panels in ten predetermined sizes derived from the golden ratio—open-ended content creates permutations that result in an archive without end. Quaytman’s practice engages three distinct stylistic modes: photo-based silkscreens, optical patterns such as moiré and scintillating grids, and hand-painted oil works. Each chapter is developed in relation to a specific exhibition opportunity, and consequently, each work is iconographically bound to its initial site of presentation.
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R. H. Quaytman (b. 1961, Boston) lives and works in Guilford, CT and New York. Quaytman studied at Bard College and at the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques in Paris, and received the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in 2001. In 2015, Quaytman was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize with Michael Krebber. Since 2006, Quaytman has taught at Bard College, in addition to lecturing at Princeton University, the Cooper Union, Columbia University, and the Yale University School of Art. In 2005, she co-founded Orchard, a cooperatively-run exhibition and event space that concluded its three-year run on the Lower East Side in 2008.
Quaytman’s work was featured in the 15th Shanghai Biennale (2025), documenta 14 (2017), the 54th Venice Biennale (2011) and the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Recent solo exhibitions of her work have taken place at Glenstone, Potomac, MD (2022), WIELS, Brussels (2021), a two-part exhibition at the Serralves Museum, Porto (2020) and Muzeum Sztuki, Lódz (2019), Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2019), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2018), Galerie Buchholz, Berlin and Cologne (2018, 2011), Secession, Vienna (2017), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016), Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2025, 2015, 2008), Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2015), Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels (2014, 2012), Renaissance Society, Chicago (2013), the Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2012), the Kunsthalle Basel (2011), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2010), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2009), among others.
Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Insititute of Chicago, the Pinault Collection, the Tate Modern, the Museo Reina Sofia, the Long Museum, the V–A–C Foundation, Fondazione Memmo, the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, among others.
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