R. H. Quaytman was born in Boston in 1961 and went on to receive a BA in painting from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (1983), before attending the postgraduate program in painting at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin (1984), and the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques, Paris (1989). Since 2001, Quaytman’s paintings have been in many ways governed by a strict set of rules. Works are organized into focused groups referred to as “chapters,” which are sequentially numbered and uniquely titled. The paintings are executed on plywood panels that conform to a consistent set of geometrically interrelated dimensions. Screenprinted photographic imagery appears in each chapter, as do abstract compositions. Despite these rigorously held consistencies, Quaytman’s work is not reducible to a systematically applied set of rules. Instead, the artist uses these parameters to explore an array of subjects, while maintaining an overarching, ongoing investigation of the factors that enable a painting to generate meaning, whether they be its content, its mode of production, or the context in which it is encountered. The decision to imitate the structure of a book by conceptualizing groups of paintings as chapters reflects Quaytman’s belief that images and their meanings are inherently contingent. The significance of each painting is dependent not only on the person standing before it but also on the image next to it, as well as the space inhabited by both viewer and artwork. Accordingly, the subject matter of each chapter is shaped in response to the context in which it is first shown. Taking into account the physical space, its history, and its present identity, Quaytman embarks on in-depth research, sometimes following idiosyncratic threads that are informed by circumstantial connections or the content of previous chapters. For example, the artist’s Point de Gaze, Chapter 23 engages three seemingly disparate topics—the sculpture of Lygia Clark, a medieval Roman Catholic order, and Belgian lace-making—which each relate to the city, Brussels, or the venue, Gladstone Gallery, where this chapter was first exhibited. The artist’s approach, which privileges receptivity over control, mirrors the structure of the chapters themselves, in which individual paintings are as likely to be linked suggestively as they are to posit definitive relationships. Through this open-ended practice, Quaytman explores painting’s capacity to create and accrue meaning in terms that are as expansive as the artist’s ever-growing body of work. Quaytman has had solo exhibitions at venues including Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2009); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2010); Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York (2010); Kunsthalle Basel (2011); Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (2013); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2016); and Secession, Vienna (2017); as well as R. H. Quaytman: + x, Chapter 34 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2018). Group exhibitions include Abstract Generation: Now in Print, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); A History: Art, Architecture, Design from the 1980s until Today, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2014); and Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015). Quaytman’s work has been included in the Lodz Biennial, Poland (2004); Whitney Biennial, New York (2010); Venice Biennale (2011); and Documenta, Athens and Kassel (2017). The artist was awarded a Rome Prize (1992) and the Wolfgang Hahn Prize (2015). Quaytman lives and works in New York and Connecticut.