Greene Naftali is pleased to present an exhibition by New York abstract painter Jacqueline Humphries. This is the artist’s sixth show at Greene Naftali and follows her recent presentation in Prospect.1 New Orleans.

Conceiving of each painting as a site in which the viewer is invited to wander, Humphries exhibits a tenacious belief in the power of physical and optical experience. The new paintings extend her intellectual investigations in abstraction, emphasizing reflectivity and gestural play. Using silver ground paint, glitter, spray paint, and color fields, Humphries creates fractured frames for complex realities and sets stages for dynamic light effects.

In her work of the past few years, Humphries has made compositions with free gestures caught in webs of disruptive vectors—results of stripping and intersecting layers of painterly activity—in a simultaneous presentation of multiple tenses. This current body of work proposes a new conception of figure/ground, presenting centralized image fields in relationships with receded fields of form. Adding a chromatic complexity to her canvases, using large and small formats, and showcasing a freedom of movement here less aggressively spliced, Humphries allows for an emotive dimension in this body of work. This new gestural iconography engages in a fresh conversation with its viewers, while inspiring possible associations such as Joan Mitchell’s abstractions, the foregrounded strokes of French painter Jean Degottex, or the analytical compositions by Humphries’ contemporary Charline von Heyl.

In a recent interview with painter Cecily Brown published in the Spring issue of BOMB Magazine, Humphries states:

“The objective is to knit wildly varying perspectives into a unified space. …Having a heightened sense of the painting changing in front of your eyes gives it an almost cinematic quality—light moves across the surface and makes new images before your eyes.”