The point of departure for this chapter in Quaytman’s oeuvre (the American artist always works in chapters) are two 15th-century paintings by Flemish artist Otto van Veen (1556–1629), Rubens’s teacher. Quaytman found the paintings in the depository of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum and initiated, as well as financially supported, their restoration. The 22 works she had created around the Old Master paintings were originally exhibited at the Secession, Vienna, in 2017, and their hanging followed an angular architectural plan that took inspiration from the museum’s famous Beethoven Frieze. For the chapter’s second outing in Berlin – and Quaytman’s second show with Galerie Buchholz – a selection of the works is presented in a more traditional way, while the images of the Van Veen originals were edited out, and replaced by two landscapes. Those, in turn, are based on photographs the artists took during a research trip to Poland, when she was working simultaneously on a chapter that would be shown at documenta 14, the chapter for Vienna, and another one slated for a 2019 retrospective in Łódź, while trying to relate all three. ‘I did seven versions of that one digital photograph of a Polish landscape,’ she writes. ‘It does not have to say its name. I know it, you know it, and nothing changes, it is a backdrop like a painting is.’
- Hili Perlson