Harvey Quaytman: Against the Static

October 17, 2018–January 27, 2019

This new retrospective charts the painter’s career from the 1960s through the 1990s, showcasing abstract experiments in form, texture, and color that are both formally rigorous and rich with sensuality and humor.

Read full description

Harvey Quaytman: Harmonica YP, 1972; acrylic and pigment on canvas; 105 x 108 in.; BAMPFA, gift of David and Renee McKee.
Harvey Quaytman: Second Cupola Capella, 1969; acrylic on canvas; 73 x 157 in; Harvey Quaytman Trust; courtesy of Van Doren Waxter, New York.
Harvey Quaytman: Wanderer, 1987; acrylic and rust on canvas; 53 3/4 x 53 ¾ in.; Collection of Anne and Robert V. Gunderson, Jr.
Harvey Quaytman: The Illusionist, 1997; synthetic polymer paint on canvas; 9' 5 1/4" x 9' 5 1/4" in.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Edward R. Broida, 2005.

Upcoming
Films
Upcoming
Events
Selected
Objects
Past
Films
Past
Events

Past Events

Thursday, January 24, 5:30 PM
Gallery Talk: John Zurier and Apsara DiQuinzio on Harvey Quaytman

Artist John Zurier joins curator Apsara DiQuinzio for a multifaceted look at Harvey Quaytman’s art.

BAMPFA
Saturday, November 10, 11:30 AM–1 PM or 1–2:30 PM
Gallery + Studio: Pour, Sprinkle, Scrape: Color Experiments Inspired by Harvey Quaytman

Discover Harvey Quaytman’s abstract paintings, then create your own experiments with shape and color.

BAMPFA

For ages 6–12 with accompanying adult(s)
Saturday, October 20, 1:30 PM
Symposium: Against the Static: New Perspectives on the Art of Harvey Quaytman

This symposium brings together critical perspectives on the artist, positioning Quaytman’s innovations within the history of abstraction in the United States and abroad.

BAMPFA
Wednesday, October 17, noon
Curator’s Talk: Apsara DiQuinzio on Harvey Quaytman

The curator of Harvey Quaytman: Against the Static offers an overview of the exhibition, tracing the trajectory of Quaytman’s career.

BAMPFA

Past Films

Harvey Quaytman: Against the Static

October 17, 2018–January 27, 2019

The paintings of Harvey Quaytman (1937–2002) are distinct for their novel explorations of shape, drawing, texture, geometric pattern, and color application. While his works display a rigorous experimentation with formalism and materiality, they are simultaneously invested with rich undertones of sensuality, complexity, and humor. This new retrospective exhibition charts the trajectory of Quaytman’s work from the 1960s to the late 1990s, including more than seventy works from key points throughout his career.

Quaytman began his career in the early 1960s, making gestural abstract paintings inspired by Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky. His focus on the character and shape of brushstrokes eventually led him to develop a style in the late 1960s that blended minimalist abstraction with an interest in gesture—in color, movement, and tactility. In this sense, his wholly unique body of work resides at the junction of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Process art, and Constructivism—a place where considerations of line, distilled geometric forms, materiality, atmosphere, and texture all coalesce. The totality of Quaytman’s highly original body of work places him squarely within the tradition of modernist painting, yet it also proves him to be one of its most capable and unsung explorers.

Born in Far Rockaway, New York, to Polish Russian Jews, Quaytman came of age in the downtown art scene of New York in the 1960s—a time when painting itself was undergoing radical transformation in form, style, and concept. Committed to abstraction, Quaytman worked intuitively; one body of work led him to the next. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was propelled forward through his quest for the arc, as witnessed in his rarely seen curvilinear, shaped paintings. In the 1980s, he returned to a rectilinear format, but began to deconstruct it. Later, he committed himself to experimenting with the cruciform pattern, as a form rather than a symbol. Throughout it all he strove to keep the eye active across the canvas. “My entire enterprise,” he said, “is against [the] static.”

Less

Harvey Quaytman: Against the Static is organized by Apsara DiQuinzio, curator of modern and contemporary art and Phyllis C. Wattis MATRIX Curator, with Valerie Moon, curatorial assistant. The exhibition is made possible with lead support from the Terra Foundation for American Art, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, R. H. Quaytman, Renee and David McKee, and Van Doren Waxter, New York. Additional in-kind support is provided by the Harvey Quaytman Trust.

Supporter

Terra Foundation for American Art
Supporter

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

Harvey Quaytman: Against the Static

Harvey Quaytman: Against the Static

October 17, 2018–January 27, 2019

Selected Exhibition Objects

Harmonica YP

Harvey Quaytman

Araras

Harvey Quaytman

Second Cupola Capella

Harvey Quaytman

The Illusionist

Harvey Quaytman

Zhili-Byli

Harvey Quaytman

Jake’s Gray

Harvey Quaytman

The Miller’s Delight

Harvey Quaytman

Riley Mumbling to Himself at Night

Harvey Quaytman

The Consolation of Logic

Harvey Quaytman

Wanderer

Harvey Quaytman

Pearls Before Pencils

Harvey Quaytman

Bordering Text

Harvey Quaytman

Past Events

Gallery Talk: John Zurier and Apsara DiQuinzio on Harvey Quaytman

Gallery + Studio: Pour, Sprinkle, Scrape: Color Experiments Inspired by Harvey Quaytman

Symposium: Against the Static: New Perspectives on the Art of Harvey Quaytman

Curator’s Talk: Apsara DiQuinzio on Harvey Quaytman

Past Films