In the work of R.H. Quaytman, there is no purity within historical memory. The artist's engagement with modernist painting grounds this concern, but its self-referential inner logic disintegrates as specific and personal narratives take over. Chapter 3: Optima takes as it's starting point the optimism and purity of op art, specifically the striped paintings of Polish artist Wadylsaw Strzeminski, whose work Quaytman absorbed on a recent trip to Lodz, Poland. Yet the goal here is not mere homage, but to form a network of associations, as the paintings reference not just Wadylsaw's optimism, but also his obsession with the Optima brand typewriter, which he enshrined in a museum. Quaytman's works reproduce one of these typewriters,

specifically one found in the office of the curator of the first museum of modern art in Europe – thereby completing the circuit from the rarified world of art to workaday life, and back to art. The circuit functions neatly, sensibly, but it becomes lost in the human ability to find meaning where none exists. Ultimately, the work addresses a kind of melancholy that the artist found throughout Poland, the melancholy of having to carve our own meaning out of an infinite network of connections.

R.H. Quaytman received a BA from Bard College in 1983 and attended the Post-Graduate program in painting at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin, Ireland in 2001. She had a solo exhibition at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York, in 2001. Recent group exhibitions include Pictures, Greene Naftali Gallery, New York, Crossing the Line, Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY, and The Earth is a Flower, Construction in Process, in Poland.