Harvey Quaytman. Hone

About

Harvey Quaytman: Hone marks the gallery’s first exhibition of Quaytman’s work since representation of the artist’s estate in 2016.

Harvey Quaytman came of age in the 70s and 80s when the art world was focused on Neo-Expressionism, Minimalism, Conceptualism and the Pictures Generation. Counter to these movements, Quaytman's work developed in response to Abstract Expressionism in an attempt to develop a more personal approach to abstraction. Harvey Quaytman: Hone features nine paintings made between 1982 and 1990, a period in which the artist favored paintings with a palette of white, black, blues, yellows, vermillion, and rust which, at times, were incorporated with crushed glass. Predicating his use of color on the basis of attraction, Quaytman noted, “I have no specific meanings, but a color must mean something to me before I use it. I must love that color and it must strike me.”

Harvey Quaytman (1937-2002) is best known for his large scale, hard-edged modernist paintings. Originally steeped in the vernacular of 60s American abstraction reminiscent of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, Quaytman found his distinctive style of abstraction in the 70s by creating unconventionally shaped paintings dominated by one or two colors. Harvey Quaytman: Hone features work from the 80s when the artist began a new chapter working within a rectangular format distinguished by bold, assertive colors. A rich palette dominates his paintings of this period, often with a cruciform as the central compositional anchor, a form that he later isolated evoking painting as object.

One of the earliest works in the show is Untitled (1983), a rectangular painting characterized by a black window on a white ground. The window hovers toward the outer border of the picture with a curved edge at the lower corner—a line that replicated his pendulum shaped works from the mid-70s. Here, the curve is incorporated within the window, taking what was outside and bringing it in. From 1985–1988, Quaytman experimented with form and perspective as the window is covered by the cruciform.

The act of looking is paramount to understand Quaytman’s choices of composition, medium and color. Close inspection reveals the richness of surface and nuanced color which brings a sensuous quality to hard edge shapes. Though an admirer of artists such as Malevich and Mondrian, Quaytman was moved more by the spirit of optimism in Suprematist painting than its physical properties.