JACQUELINE HUMPHRIES | UNTITLED

Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in September 2007

“Over the course of fifteen years or so, Humphries has argued for abstract painting as a piquant site for direct spectatorial experience, at once ephemerally contingent and aggressively present… Over the course of her career, Humphries has explored a number of different modes of abstraction. She has played forcefully with the drip, for instance, and regularly utilizes what might be considered unexpectedly ‘interactive’ pigment... She once described hers as an interest in ‘making paintings that engage one in a kind of dramatic physical event.’

She’s suggesting that the space between the work of art and the viewer is what counts as the real occasion—a philosophy shared by a number of today’s most interesting practitioners of abstraction… including Rachel Harrison, Mary Heilmann, and Charline von Heyl. [In these works] Humphries’s move beyond the canvas is made literal… the viewer is strongly tempted to dance in front of paintings that seem to change according to one’s viewpoint. And while a shifting center (or total lack of center) has, of course, long been the prerogative of abstract painting, its affect has rarely been so obviously generated by the viewer instead of by the artist.”

(Johanna Burton, “Jacqueline Humphries: Greene Naftali Gallery”, Artforum, February 2007, Vol. 45, No 6, p.292)