Over the past four decades, Jacqueline Humphries has been working through the question of what contemporary abstract painting can mean in a society mediated online. Excavating the limits of her medium, Humphries generates a density of languages, forms and gestures native not only to the history of painting but also the codes and aesthetic registers that belong to the endless scroll of data and commerce on the flat cold surfaces of screens. Honing in on the surface of things, she has used gridded stencils, fluorescent paint, emoticons, and black light, among other materials in order to paraphrase, parody, and rewrite the codes of post-war abstraction. She disrupts the traditional oppositions of figure/ground and flatness/depth to create anti-illusionistic, anti-representational images, making and then, as she calls it “unmaking” her works in order to toy with ideas of historicization and authenticity. As such, Humphries’ work revels in its playful profanity, the pleasure of its sheer materiality seeping from its surface. She describes her search as one for “a kind of psychological hook”, evoking suspense or a sense of something wrong. This nameless, spectral sensation creeps across much of her oeuvre; her large-scale, commanding paintings invite close inspection, while at the same time eluding and confusing the ways in which their surfaces were worked by Humphries herself.

Jacqueline Humphries was born in New Orleans in 1960, and lives and works in New York. A graduate of Parsons School of Design and subsequently the Whitney Independent Study Program, she has mounted solo institutional exhibitions at Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2021); Dia Art Foundation, The Dan Flavin Art Institute, Bridgehampton (2019); the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2015); and Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven (2000). She has participated in recent group exhibitions at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill (2021); the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (2019); Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2019); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2018); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2018); and Tate Modern, London (2016). Her works are held in collections including the Dallas Museum of Art; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MoMA, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; SFMOMA, San Francisco; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Paintings by Humphries are currently included in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani.