R. H. Quaytman

Phocis Pole

R. H. Quaytman’s family on her father’s side is of Jewish heritage from Poland. In the summer of 2016, Quaytman traveled to Poland to research an upcoming retrospective exhibition taking place in Warsaw and ?ódz, the town from which her great-grandfather emigrated to the United States. Tracing her grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s origins, Phocis Pole is from a series of paintings that explores her paternal lineage. Both men died in 1940 in a car accident in which they were hit by a Long Island Railroad train. During the research trip, Quaytman journeyed to the grounds of the World War II concentration camp in Treblinka and took a series of photographs. The landscape depicted in this painting is based on those photographs. They function as the background to a mystical and intimidating fire that animates memories of this period. 

The artwork’s name is a reference to the historical region of central Greece named Phocis, which controlled the oracle at Delphi, which was consulted on important decisions throughout the ancient classical world. In this painting, Quaytman attempts to freeze different temporal strata on the same ground in order to blur visual perception, conjuring something ancient about the work. The artist’s investigations of photographic archives are employed as source material for the imagery in her paintings. The archival time spans, the screen-printing, how the work takes its form, the materialization of the object are all superimposed in this work. In her book Spine, Quaytman writes that “My central concern was: What happens when the source of what is depicted disappears and is replaced by a painting.”

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R. H. Quaytman, Spine, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011, p. 7.