Jacqueline Humphries

"While I draw from the alphabets and characters of communication there is no message or messaging in my work. I think the brute and mute letters and figures stripped of meaning nonetheless press upon us a ghostly kind of touch.

 

Screens are both our main way of communicating and the biggest barricade to communication - becoming vehicles for gaslighting, ghosting and avoidance.

 

I use painting to create a different type of screen that adheres to a more tactile mode of contact."

 

— Jacqueline Humphries 

Modern Art is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Jacqueline Humphries. This is Humphries’ fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.  Over the past four decades, Jacqueline Humphries has been working through the question of what contemporary abstract painting can mean in a society mediated online. Excavating the limits of her medium, Humphries generates a density of languages, forms and gestures native not only to the history of painting but also the codes and aesthetic registers that belong to the endless scroll of data and commerce on the flat cold surfaces of screens.

 

Using stencils, fluorescent paint and black light, to name a few of her materials, Humphries’ work revels in its playful profanity, the pleasure of its sheer materiality seeping from its surface. Humphries describes her search as one for ​“a kind of psychological hook, as if there’s almost suspense or a sense of something wrong”. This nameless sensation creeps across much of her oeuvre; her large-scale, commanding paintings inviting close inspection, while at the same time eluding and confusing the ways in which their surfaces were worked by Humphries herself. 

For the occasion of this exhibition, Humphries is exhibiting a new series which she has described as ​‘pre vandalised’ paintings. Absorbing the recent shock tactics engaged by eco-activists, Humphries’s latest works are repeatedly inscribed with motifs of vandalism, with paint apparently flung onto their surfaces as though to disfigure the artwork beneath. Yet Humphries is not simply simulating these marks of defacement or destruction – namely pea soup or black liquid splattered across masterpieces in museums. Instead, in repeating and working through them, her canvases seem to propose a curiosity about how we may consider these disruptive marks as active agents themselves, containing within them intelligence of media and attention economies. In so doing, Humphries’s new paintings continue to locate a rupture between symbolic and real, or, in her own words ​“bring abstraction into a renewed confrontation with the actual world.”

 

Whilst Humphries is known to relocate previous motifs and signs from the matrix of her own oeuvre — her last exhibition at Modern Art even translated older paintings in their entirety through ascii code — this latest series of paintings also now locate themselves through previous gallery inventory numbers, painted here as a part of their intrinsic subject and now existing within a displaced system of classification.