R.H. Quaytman describes the topic of her lecture as follows:

‘The initial urge twenty-five years ago to call my exhibitions 'chapters' in an ongoing, till death do us part, Book, sprang from an anxiety I was having about my lack of a subject. What were my paintings about or doing? Saying they were about painting seemed too vague, glib even. There seemed no satisfying or viable way to truthfully respond to that question. The metaphor of a book turned out to have many more consequences than I could have foreseen in the beginning.  For the past year and half, I took a break from exhibition making in order to write.  ‘Book.’ is the result.  It is a volume that continues where the previous companion book ‘Spine’ left off, showing every painting made between 2011 and 2020. ‘Spine’ was composed in a similar way as ‘Book’, showing every painting in each chapter with relevant data and descriptions of the exhibitions. As the chapters progressed in time however, the scope and complexity of subjects expanded.  I would like to discuss the ups and downs of writing about one’s own work––of applying language to pictures.

R.H. Quaytman is an American artist who lives and works in Guilford, CT. She is known for her painting practice, which is organized into chapters dating back to 2001. 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, and in 2022, she was awarded the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters. Her works have been featured in Documenta 14, the 54th Venice Biennale, and the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Solo shows dedicated to her work have taken place at WIELS, Brussels, Belgium; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Secession, Vienna; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Renaissance Society, Chicago, and other venues. ‘Modern Subjects, Chapter Zero’, opened in 2021 at the WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art in Brussels. ‘The Sun Does Not Move, Chapter 35’, opened in 2019 at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland, and traveled to the Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal, in 2020. Her work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. Quaytman mounted an exhibition of her work in the Glenstone Museum collection in Potomac, MD, in 2022. She is working on a book about the last decade of chapters or exhibitions.

The lecture will be held in English.