The American artist Jacqueline Humphries came of age as painter in New York in the 1980s. Many of her peers deemed painting, as the adage goes, to be “dead;” to paint, as Humphries herself has said, was “artistic suicide.” Despite the theoretical orthodoxy of that moment, for over three decades, Humphries, alongside a cohort of artists including Charline von Heyl, Jutta Koether, Laura Owens, and Amy Sillman, has nonetheless upended the traditions of painterly abstraction in the face of the medium’s so-called “obsolescence.” Humphries is attuned to the relationship between abstraction and technology and many of her paintings invariably meditate on the mysterious gap between objects, their representations, and the materials – and materiality – of image-making. In the early 2000s, Humphries began making largescale works utilising silver and non-reflective black paints to reproduce the uncanny feeling of attraction that one feels when met with a monitor’s artificial glow. Over the last decade, she has begun to incorporate languages and signs pilfered from the digital world (such as ASCII, CAPTCHA, emoticons, and emoji) to associate them with expressionistic imagery and convey a sense of ambiguity. More recently, she has turned to patterning inspired by white noise. Suggesting the volatility of images awash in endless streams of data, the dense materiality of Humphries’ stencilled patterns operate as corrective to the idea that our screen culture is purely virtual; it is physical too.
Madeline Weisburg
