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拍品專文
At nearly eight feet square, Jacqueline Humphries Untitled offers an evocative painterly surface, rich with gestural associations. Silver, red, blue, and pink unite with black, with the latter acting to enhance the potency of the other dazzling colors. In addition, parallel lines surround this dance of pigment, offering a sense of order within abstract forms. Critic Jason Farago describes Humphries’s oeuvre as “shimmering, burbling abstract paintings that agglutinate stenciled marks, typographical stutters, and deceptive spills and splashes that in fact result from careful composition” (J. Farago, “Jacqueline Humphries’s Digital Paintings, Aglow in the Dark,” New York Times, September 5, 2019).
Humphries cites the Abstract Expressionists as a source of inspiration. In a conversation with fellow artist Cecily Brown, she notes, “I was terribly interested in what had been achieved by the New York School. How a Barnett Newman can be so aggressive, and also inviting; the way a Pollock messes with your mind and body; the kind of direct address of a Guston. The way a de Kooning feels almost magnified and turned inside out” (J. Humphries and C. Brown, “Jacqueline Humphries by Cecily Brown,” BOMB Magazine, April 1, 2009). Newman is especially relevant to Untitled in his and Humphries’s shared interest in the frame. Newman’s “zip” becomes a metaphor for the frame, which is a kind of scaffolding. Yet for both artists, this admixture of form and line is not a source of restriction; it rather frees the medium from convention. Untitled also inherits the playfulness of Newman’s quasi-figurative works, like his Untitled (1945), in which the “zip” becomes a curved field that envelops a tree-like form.
Humphries was and remains a pioneer. In art school in the 1980s, photography was dominant to the point that her instructors suggested she forsake painting altogether. She recalls of her classmates at the revered Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, “A bunch of the fellows got together one day and marched into my studio as a group and told me I had to stop painting,” (J. Humphries, quoted in J. Halperin, “Artist Jacqueline Humphries: ‘They told me I had to stop painting,’” Financial Times, May 30, 2023). Her hero Édouard Manet took a similar stand with canvases like Olympia (1863, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), which likewise provoked controversy. Humphries, part of a small group that insisted on the continued relevance of painting, has only continued to prove the prescience of her convictions.
Humphries was included in The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Her first large-scale museum exhibition, curated by Mark Godfrey, was mounted in 2021-2022 by the Wexner Center of the Arts at the Ohio State University, Columbus. Godfrey has rightly written, “Humphries has taken her place as one of the most interesting figures in an increasingly celebrated generation of painters that also notably includes Laura Owens, Amy Sillman, and Charline von Heyl” (M. Godfrey, “Statements of Intent: The Art of Jacqueline Humphries, Laura Owens, Amy Sillman, and Charline von Heyl,” Artforum, May 2014). She also showed new work in 2019-2020 at the Dia Art Foundation in Bridgehampton, New York. Her paintings are also in prestigious public collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Modern, London, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris.
Cecily Brown writes of Humphries’s silver paintings like Untitled, “Her silver paintings reflect glaring bursts of light back at the viewer, necessitating a multi-angled tour of the canvas in order to form a complete image of it. With strokes both gestural and hard-edged, the silver paintings are a heap of contradictions: they catcall only to become invisible; their spontaneity is policed by tape” (J. Humphries and C. Brown, “Jacqueline Humphries by Cecily Brown,” BOMB Magazine, April 1, 2009). Untitled revels in these contradictions: red collides with black, negative space tames energetic marks, and biomorphic forms coexist with regimented marks. The use of metallic silver paint is perhaps most often associated with Jackson Pollock, but Humphries takes this history and makes it all her own. She evokes not the robotic, but rather the sensual and the natural. It makes sense that many contemporary painters like Brown celebrate Humphries’s work. She lovingly elevates painting, even as she pushes it to new forms of expression. Untitled is an exuberant standout in Humphries’s ever-expanding practice.
Humphries cites the Abstract Expressionists as a source of inspiration. In a conversation with fellow artist Cecily Brown, she notes, “I was terribly interested in what had been achieved by the New York School. How a Barnett Newman can be so aggressive, and also inviting; the way a Pollock messes with your mind and body; the kind of direct address of a Guston. The way a de Kooning feels almost magnified and turned inside out” (J. Humphries and C. Brown, “Jacqueline Humphries by Cecily Brown,” BOMB Magazine, April 1, 2009). Newman is especially relevant to Untitled in his and Humphries’s shared interest in the frame. Newman’s “zip” becomes a metaphor for the frame, which is a kind of scaffolding. Yet for both artists, this admixture of form and line is not a source of restriction; it rather frees the medium from convention. Untitled also inherits the playfulness of Newman’s quasi-figurative works, like his Untitled (1945), in which the “zip” becomes a curved field that envelops a tree-like form.
Humphries was and remains a pioneer. In art school in the 1980s, photography was dominant to the point that her instructors suggested she forsake painting altogether. She recalls of her classmates at the revered Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, “A bunch of the fellows got together one day and marched into my studio as a group and told me I had to stop painting,” (J. Humphries, quoted in J. Halperin, “Artist Jacqueline Humphries: ‘They told me I had to stop painting,’” Financial Times, May 30, 2023). Her hero Édouard Manet took a similar stand with canvases like Olympia (1863, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), which likewise provoked controversy. Humphries, part of a small group that insisted on the continued relevance of painting, has only continued to prove the prescience of her convictions.
Humphries was included in The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Her first large-scale museum exhibition, curated by Mark Godfrey, was mounted in 2021-2022 by the Wexner Center of the Arts at the Ohio State University, Columbus. Godfrey has rightly written, “Humphries has taken her place as one of the most interesting figures in an increasingly celebrated generation of painters that also notably includes Laura Owens, Amy Sillman, and Charline von Heyl” (M. Godfrey, “Statements of Intent: The Art of Jacqueline Humphries, Laura Owens, Amy Sillman, and Charline von Heyl,” Artforum, May 2014). She also showed new work in 2019-2020 at the Dia Art Foundation in Bridgehampton, New York. Her paintings are also in prestigious public collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Modern, London, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris.
Cecily Brown writes of Humphries’s silver paintings like Untitled, “Her silver paintings reflect glaring bursts of light back at the viewer, necessitating a multi-angled tour of the canvas in order to form a complete image of it. With strokes both gestural and hard-edged, the silver paintings are a heap of contradictions: they catcall only to become invisible; their spontaneity is policed by tape” (J. Humphries and C. Brown, “Jacqueline Humphries by Cecily Brown,” BOMB Magazine, April 1, 2009). Untitled revels in these contradictions: red collides with black, negative space tames energetic marks, and biomorphic forms coexist with regimented marks. The use of metallic silver paint is perhaps most often associated with Jackson Pollock, but Humphries takes this history and makes it all her own. She evokes not the robotic, but rather the sensual and the natural. It makes sense that many contemporary painters like Brown celebrate Humphries’s work. She lovingly elevates painting, even as she pushes it to new forms of expression. Untitled is an exuberant standout in Humphries’s ever-expanding practice.