Jacqueline Humphries

Jacqueline Humphries is an abstract painter known for her alluring and optically dazzling work that tests the limits of painting as a medium, subjecting the canvas to a range of painted actions and erasures and synthesizing physical and psychological space onto the painted field. Throughout her career Humphries has adapted to and subverted painting’s formal and discursive conditions, often with reference to both art history and cutting-edge technological formats. In the early 2000s, Humphries began making large scale paintings utilizing silver and non-reflective black paint to reproduce the uncanny attraction of the digital screen. Over the last decade, her work has incorporated digital signs and symbols such as emoticons, CAPTCHA, ASCII, and emojis, associating them with expressionistic imagery and conveying a sense of ambiguity. Humphries’ paintings are densely layered, replicating the volatility of images awash in endless streams of data and pushing against the idea that our screen culture is purely virtual.

Born in 1960 in New Orleans, Louisiana, Humphries studied at Parsons School of Design in New York and went on to enroll in the Whitney Museum Independent Study program. Humphries came of age as a painter in New York at a time when many of her peers deemed painting a “dead” medium. Humphries emerged as a leading abstract artist with large-scale compositions that combined contemporary culture, hard-edge geometry, and fluid gesture. A testament to her inventive practice, Humphries was included in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams. Her work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; and Museum Brandhorst, Munich, among others.