Untitled

Jacqueline Humphries has built an impressive career on challenging and revising the legacies of mid-century American gestural abstraction. In her works from the 1990s on, various strategies of intervention—stencils, tape, screening, rotating the canvas while painting, etc.—serve to move her practice beyond Abstract Expressionism’s impulsive brushstrokes, splashes, or fields of color to something more deliberate and mediated. This captivating example reveals the artist’s extremely sophisticated and technically engaged process. Since the mid-2010s, Humphries has layered her compositions with computer texts and images rendered from ASCII code or other mediated languages, applying digital tools to an analogue medium. She has also mined the other minutiae of digital correspondence as motifs, where smiley faces, asterisks, dashes, and slashes begin to take shape in a field of information. The canvas surface becomes a "screen," of sorts, onto which the artist collates computer data via gestural marks. "There is no definitive image," Humphries has said, "nothing which synthesizes or sums up, just an endless torrent. The screen itself is the unifying element, and compresses within itself this multitude."[1] To translate these characters into painting, Humphries slices them into thick vinyl using a laser cutter in her Brooklyn studio. These plastic stencils then become the tools through which she drags thick and viscous, colorful, or metallic layers of paint. The resulting paintings are as much the products of our highly mediated—and media-frenzied—moment as they are an homage to, and reaction against, modernist painting and abstraction.


[1] David Ryan, "Painting as Event: An Interview with Jacqueline Humphries," Journal of Contemporary Painting 4, no. 1 (2018), p. 54.