12 February – 14 March, 1998

Exhibition

Opening Reception Thursday, February 19th, 6-8pm

The Spencer Brownstone Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of recent paintings by Rebecca Quaytman.
Quaytman is concerned with how one work is perceived in relation to others in a series or within an artist's oeuvre. By bringing up issues of interdependence and relationship, Quaytman suggests a fresh way of viewing a group of work by vanquishing the painting / object's authority, referencing both the viewer and the space with equal importance.
For this exhibition, Quaytman combines a variety of genres to provide sequences of paintings that establish visual sentences. These genres can be divided into the following categories: portraiture, silk-screens of site-specific architectural models, biomorphic face/figure forms, arrows, paintings of the edges of panels and optically vibrating grids. All are incorporated into Quaytman's ocular narratives. She distills these disparate elements into an index of rhymes, similarities and interrelationships, which when combined, achieve a distinct way of looking at a room full of paintings.
The two portraits in the exhibition are of the artist Dan Graham and of her mother, the poet Susan Howe. These portraits have been slightly manipulated in a computer in order to give a literal means of access to ideas contained in the exhibition as a whole.
The multiple meanings in both portraits are reinforced by the more iconic/abstract paintings that surround them. In these, Quaytman compares the velocity of seeing and interpretation against the stasis of self sufficient isolation represented by the paintings themselves. The exhibition space becomes a trajectory of concise pictorial experiences informed by the history of conceptual, minimal and site-specific art practice which has so forcefully critiqued painting's embrace of objecthood, authorship and aesthetics. Quaytman states, "The orientation of the painting's subject towards the viewer, the author and the site is constantly shifting - shifting away from the target of their individual authority, towards a path of disappearance."

Artist Bio

Rebecca Quaytman lives and works in New York City. She studied painting at Bard College, The Skowhegen School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine and the Institut Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques, Paris, France. Quaytman was the recipient of the Rome Prize in Fine Arts in 1992. Her work has been written about in Arts Magazine, The New York Times, Art News and Art in America.