CS I loved visiting your fabulously organised, elegant atelier in Guilford, Connecticut. Among the many things that caught my eye were images based on the art of a Belgian painter, Antoine Joseph Wiertz, whose striking paintings delight in severe distortions and optical illusions. You have delved deeply into his work, and the sculptures of the Polish radical constructivist Katarzyna Kobro, whom you discovered when you went to Łódź in search of an almost silent chapter of your paternal family history. Can you talk about why these artworks led to these deep, years-long investigations? 

RQ Sometimes I’m just really blown away. It’s the revelation that, oh, my God, I can use that!

CS Use in what way?

RQ As a way of thinking about art. Before I started structuring my work as chapters, I was exploring perspective in paintings that seemed as if they were turned back, like on a hinge. 

CS Was that inspired by Renaissance painting, or did you arrive there another way?

RQ I think it was inspired by the desire to be an abstract painter while also wanting to tell a story, and that’s where the distortion comes in. It seemed like our entire world was being devoured by photography and computers, and that painters had stepped away from that problem. For a long time, I made paintings dealing with that explicitly, and then I started using a Polaroid camera. I made site-specific paintings of the space where the painting was going to be hung, and then I would photograph it with the camera and blow it up. It would be like a mise-en-scène – a picture of the space within the space. When I was invited to participate in the biennial in Łódź, Poland, I thought I would remake one of Kobro’s sculptures and photograph it. I was so very impressed with her sculptures. I thought they were really incredible – so beautiful and interesting. 

CS  You also expanded on the work of Hilma af Klint by remaking it, and in doing so became instrumental in resurrecting her from oblivion.

RQ I found out about her because my father brought me a catalogue from her show in Sweden, because he knew I would love her work. I did love it. Then I was promoted at the art institution MoMA PS1 from answering the phones to being the programme coordinator, and I put on her first show in New York. At the time, PS1 was such a shoestring enterprise – there would be five visitors a day. Hilma, however, drew a lot of people.

CS I remember the PS1 from the early 1980s, when it was a rough and raw place, though very fabulous. 

RQ It was rough. We all had to clean the bathrooms.

CS How did you come up with the concept of referring to your painting as “bookmaking”?

RQ  It’s just a way to think about art. It’s a different way to organise people’s thoughts and to extend time. I was kind of dumb about it: if the writing was asking for art with a temporal dimension, like film and video, I did it by just saying it, using a word. Words are powerful. I had the idea of the paintings being like pages before I had the idea of thinking about an exhibition as a chapter. 

CS You have said that this approach was liberating – how so?

RQ MI discovered that it magically integrated my work into more complicated ideas that were outside the domain of painting, simply because I couldn’t understand what the domain of painting was anymore. I just knew that the way I was doing it wasn’t going anywhere. I’d get maybe one show a year. I couldn’t get a gallery – I needed something kind of meta to pull it together, because I tend to make paintings that are very different from each other. 

CS What are the parameters of a chapter?

RQ What defines a chapter is that it’s an exhibition that is taking place and that has a title. It’s really about time. The next chapter will be China, 2025, where I will just show one painting, but a painting that I worked on for three years. I became obsessed. I had all these other ideas for China, and they all fell away. To me, it’s an emotional response to what’s happening in America. I started with a leftover painting from what I refer to as the weird chapter, chapter zero. Everything changed in 2020, and I wanted to mark that and begin again, because I didn’t know how to bring all the content of the chapters together in a cohesive way. So, I started with Antoine Joseph Wiertz, who is very strange. Many people see him as a bad painter. He is so intense – I like that about him. The museum dedicated to him in Brussels is a whole conceptual art installation. He was one of the first people to use photography in painting, and he created the biggest paintings that feel like they’re going to crush you. There was next to no serious writing on him, because he was just too wild and too crazy. I couldn’t believe that he had managed to construct this gigantic studio filled with paintings that were still too big to stand upright in those vast rooms, and that he also got the state to preserve it all in perpetuity. I think he was like Barnum & Bailey: a circus. But he was also a leftist and painted what he called “modern subjects” – and those were all pretty radical. He would also raise funds for women who could not pay for daycare. I wondered how it could be that there was no serious art writing about this guy. Marcel Broodthaers loved him. I’m sure James Ensor went to his museum. So I decided to make all the panels in the biggest available size, and that they would all have Op Art patterns.

CS Did your “bookmaking” involve any writing at all?

RQ I didn’t want to write a book, but I forced myself to write every day. Occasionally, I would have an idea to try to paint something. I listened to a lot of podcasts about outer space and visited Hilma. I grappled with her spirituality. I was deeply confused about my own spirituality – namely, did I have any? If so, how does it manifest, or how does it feel? 

CS I tried to listen to the Neil deGrasse Tyson podcast about the universe, which is interesting, but he always laughs at his own jokes. I need to find another astrophysicist.

RQ I have a guy I like. Inspired by Hilma, I also researched Madame Blavatsky – there needs to be more work on her. Everybody is interested in her because she influenced all of the spiritualists. The other important woman in that world is the theosophist and women’s rights activist Annie Besant in the late 19th and early 20th century. I had heard her name and became interested, but I know not much more than that her books about these theosophical ideas contain diagrams and geometry. She was a major feminist. I followed that story and found David Bohm, who opened the world of physics for me. There’s a good film about him, Infinite Potential, made a few years ago in 2020. That’s how I started following these podcasters. They discuss the idea of the pale green photograph. It’s very ugly, but it’s important: think of planet Earth as a camera taking pictures as far as possible into outer space. Eventually, I ended up just drawing squiggly lines. What I ended up with is this design of a panel that looks very much like Stravinsky’s notations – and so much modernist art consists of marks like that. I thought that was weird. The universe is making modernist marks, but in a very orderly way.

CS At your recent show at Miguel Abreu Gallery on the Lower East Side – a neighbourhood where you were once part of a very cool artist-run space – a friend of yours pointed out the importance of your father, the painter Harvey Quaytman, for influencing your views on art. 

RQ Definitely, yes. I have all his rules in my head – and there are many.

CS  What’s the most important one? 

RQ Well, he was really an abstract painter, so he didn’t use figures. That’s hard to do. He was kind of eccentric – I’m pretty rational compared to him. The concept of the archivist came up because we had to deal with all the work my father left behind, and the kind of chaos that came with it. I was turning 40 at the time, and I thought my father’s fate might happen to me, too. So, I learned to organise my work, to put my paintings neatly on a shelf, and to devote the necessary time to that. It really opened everything – the entire problem of cohesion disappeared by declaring each piece a chapter of a book and those books are all connected. 

CS You also systematised your father’s work – did you learn something from that process? 

RQ Well, he was kind of an aesthete, a connoisseur, and he liked to show me what a great one he was – of museums and of printmaking, of every method. He was a teacher to me, and he had a lot of respect for art history. He was also very, very good with materials. However, he didn’t organise himself and didn’t have an overarching theory about his work, although there were distinct periods in it. 

CS Were you involved in his posthumous exhibitions? 

RQ  I organised one at PS1 years ago, but not really anything else. There’s not so much I can do for my father, other than just be me and make art. I think he would probably love that – or he is loving it. 

CS You had a seminal experience when you learned that your father’s grandfather, an immigrant from Łódź, and his brother-in-law and grandfather were killed in their car on their return from the 1940s World Fair in Queens when they were struck by a train. You created 40 small paintings in commemoration of that event. I was curious about the combination of something so deeply dramatic and personal, and the way you found a form for it. Significantly, this commemoration was also the first of your chapters. 

RQ Forty paintings were going to be shown at the Queens Museum, on the site of the World’s Fair that my great-grandfather and his son were visiting on the day they died in 1940. I was less interested in these two individuals than in history, and their story as part of history. 

“Point de Gaze”, Chapter 23, R.H. Quaytman (2012).

CS What was it like to visit Łódź, after having learnt that it was where your family originated?

RQ I had been to the Soviet Union, to St Petersburg, in 1989, 
the year the wall came down. After I learned about the train accident that killed my relatives, I wanted to go to Poland, with trains there inevitably bringing up the Holocaust. I used the metaphor of the train like film stills. My father was dying at that point from cancer, and he didn’t know what really had happened to his relatives, so in Poland I tried to figure it out. The incident was mentioned in a newspaper called the Sun. That chapter was one of the hardest things to write, not least because there is a strong Hebraic element. Germany, Austria and Israel were important places for that strand of my family, and I went to all of them. For the Tel Aviv chapter, the imagery was an Iranian trans man, a man protesting the killing of George Floyd, and then Martin Luther and Paul Klee. I also included an engraving of the Hebrew word hakuk, which means “engraved”. I have a collection of prints, including Peter Paul Rubens’ The Judgement of Paris, a famous print that appears in many paintings. I like the whole history of engravings, as it’s a crucial invention similar to the book – it’s the first way paintings were reproduced. My first chapter has a polaroid of a print by the 16th-century engraver Raimondi. In Chapter 23, I was dealing with the transition of my daughter Iris to my son Isaac. I took polaroids of him wearing a mask.

CS Can you tell me your feelings about geometry? You have said that it allows you to put very different pictorial ideas together. Do you use it as an organising mode of work? 

RQ To me, it connotes the opposite of violence. It is harmony. Geometry is a restful place. It is as close as I get to spirituality, as it is generative. That’s what I like about the golden mean – it is so full of possibilities and connections. .