Jacqueline Humphries

Untitled

1988

Signed lower right. Born in 1975 in Hanoi Graduated from Hanoi Fine Art University in 2000. 1999, 2003, 2005 ,2006 - Participated in various in group Exhibitions in Hanoi. 2006 - Pa...

signed and dated upper right. Artist Vu Duc Toan was born and raised in Hanoi's Old Quarter, imbued with the elegant and artistic spirit of the people of Trang An. The artist studie...

By the mid-1980s painting had been declared “dead” several times over. But for the contemporary painter Jacqueline Humphries, the medium became a “rogue practice”; however risky, it has remained her foundation. “Painting can adapt to anything,” she notes. Throughout her career Humphries has thus adapted to—and subverted—painting’s formal and discursive conditions, often with reference to both art history and cutting-edge technological formats. Early canvases, such as those in her 1995 Greene Naftali show (the gallery’s first solo presentation), probe the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, envisioning that movement’s chaotic drips not as destructive but constructive—as a sort of code which Humphries manipulates to form the basis of her own works. Balancing conceptual maneuvers and striking opticality in the ample space of her canvases, Humphries, like her peers Laura Owens...

Jessica Houston’s most recent works look north. What is north? Where is it? Is it a fixed place, or something else? Her second solo show at Art Mûr brings together paintings, a sound sculpture, and chine collé prints, all of which reveal a fragile, fluid, and often fractured, north. An iron ore stone becomes a speaker, playing recordings of interviews and singing, and expanding the physical presence of the stone. The exaggerated textures of the paintings give them, too, a sculptural and documentary feel. They record how actions—breaking and piercing, pushing and pulling—disrupt and transform the paintings’ surfaces. By resembling patterns one finds in the wild—scratches across the surface of a rock, uneven waves that form on melting snow—they unhinge any clear distinction between what is natural and what is made. Made with a printmaking technique that binds together distinct papers, the chine collé prints begin with photographs Houston took of Baffin Island. She then combines the images with coloured paper, creating traces of the process of extracting and replacing parts of a scene, and an equal awareness of both what is present and absent. Some are composed of double circles, like looking through binoculars. In Business As Usual, a decaying interior—peeling wallpaper...