R. H. Quaytman

(December 6, 2012) The Renaissance Society will present Passing Through The Opposite of What it Approaches, Chapter 25, a new body of work by R. H. Quaytman, with the opening reception on January 6, 2013. The artist will speak at 5pm.

Quaytman’s practice creates installations of painted panels termed ‘chapters.’ The ongoing chapters, begun in 2001, explore formalist and conceptual variations of ideas about painting, as well as the poetic and grammatical possibilities of photographically-based imagery. The installations combine abstraction, often with optical effects, and images related to the sites in which the paintings are first exhibited. For The Renaissance Society, the artist has been researching the history of the museum from the 1970s and 80s, a time when the museum’s director, Susanne Ghez, was presenting important early exhibitions of conceptual art, at the beginning of what would come to be her internationally influential career. Ghez is celebrating her 40th anniversary at The Renaissance Society and Quaytman is interested in the friendship between Ghez and Anne Rorimer, one of Conceptual Art’s first historians and curators. Many of the artists shown by Ghez and Rorimer, including Buren, Graham, Toroni, Asher, and Coleman, impacted Quaytman’s approach to painting. Architect John Vinci, another Chicago collaborator of Ghez and Rorimer, has allowed the artist to use several of his teaching slides depicting Mies Van Der Rohe's Chapel of Saint Savior on the campus of Illinois Institute of Technology.

R.H. Quaytman lives and works in New York. The artist received a B.A. in painting from Bard College (1983), and attended the post-graduate program in painting at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin (1984) and the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques in Paris (1989). Quaytman was director of Orchard, a cooperative gallery in New York, open from 2005 to 2008, and is currently faculty of Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. Recent group exhibitions include: 2010 Whitney Biennial, 54th Venice Biennale, ILLUMinations (2011), Nikolas Gambraroff, Michael Krebber, Blake Rayne, R.H. Quaytman, Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2010) Solo exhibitions include Dalet, Chapter 24 at Museum Abteiberg, Monchengladbach, Germany (2012)Momentum 15 at the ICA Boston (2009), Spine, Chapter 20 at the Kunsthalle Basel (2011), and I Love - The Eyelid Clicks/I see/Cold Poetry, Chapter 18, the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2010).

R. H. Quaytman