Jacqueline Humphries Paintings

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...