RH Quaytman at MOCA

I went to see the RH Quaytman show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA. RH Quaytman is an artist from Boston whose career began in the nineties. She is known for combining oil painting and silk screen. She makes conceptually linked works that make up 'chapters'; the exhibit I went to was called 'Chapter 30: Morning'. Usually her work is site specific, and incorporates features of the venue in the work. Each piece is printed and painted onto a wood block, and many of them seem to explore landscapes and texture. There were some that included more obvious 'photo' layers like in her earlier work, but there were a lot of these color field landscapes. These seem to be a departure from earlier, more figurative work, but they have the same ambient characteristics. (I included some of her earlier work at the end of this blog post because it's so amazing.) The picture above is just two images of many that are arranged next to each other across a whole wall of the exhibit.

The silkscreen layers seem to me to be photo emulsion. They have the quality of something being distorted through xerox with the texture you would find looking at something under a microscope. This piece in particular almost looks like a diagram of the different layers of soil. 
With the knowledge that all of her work is site specific, I wonder if it's an abstract study of a desert in California. (She lives in New York.) Her work is what we would call an example of 'experimental forms' because it combines oil painting and silkscreen. I think it's so interesting to see artists use a method like this without creating an edition. The quality of the silkscreen layers makes the paintings, for me.

I love RH Quaytman and I was super excited to see some of her paintings. This show will be at MOCA on Grand Ave until February 6th if anyone is interested in seeing it. 

Some of her earlier work:

-Scarlet Sidwell