Harvey Quaytman

Harvey Quaytman’s interpretation of 1960s Minimalism and Hard-edge abstraction culminated in work that swayed between two and three dimensions. The result was sometimes odd but always elegant: arching forms appear like wedged shoehorns within the pictorial space, gently exposing painting’s material infrastructure. During the 1970s, Quaytman delved further into abstraction; experimenting with rich, heavy pigments as well as his signature medium, rust. From 1985 onwards his work focused on the intersection of lines in cruciform shapes, giving his lifelong curiosity about the nature of painting a strict, mathematical logic.

Quaytman’s paintings have been the subject of many solo exhibitions and retrospectives over the course of his career including Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX, The Jewish Museum, New York, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, Onnasch Galerie, Cologne, Germany, and Galerie Ostergren, Malmö, Sweden, among many others. Quaytman was the recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979), National Endowment for the Arts (1983), Elizabeth Foundation Prize for Painting (1994), and an Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1997).