The Greene Naftali Gallery will present an exhibition of new paintings by Jacqueline Humphries, opening November 9th and continuing through December 9th. The exhibition marks Humphries’ fifth solo show at Greene Naftali and the first in the new space. It follows the “Seven Sisters” solo exhibition at Williams College, Amherst last summer and “Black Light Paintings” at NyeHaus, New York last spring. In the current show, Humphries will present a series of large and small-scale abstract paintings which utilize the reflective and transformative properties of silver grounds.

Widely regarded as a New York painter, Humphries continues her explorations in abstraction, posing painting as an active site for the channeling of contemporary visual issues. Her canvases take an extreme and increasingly rare position by avoiding overt quotations of painting “styles” and instead rely on the power of physical experience and perceptual sensations. The paintings aim to create a dramatic encounter with the viewer through shifting silver grounds that change with both the light and one’s physical relationship to them. Aesthetic issues are foregrounded but beauty is a by-product and formal issues are the scaffolding to project the experience, not ends in themselves.

“Contemporary consciousness is completely absorbed in abstraction, the shared reality of that is everywhere and in everything. How I engage that in painting is very intuitive. It is part of being in the flow which is life. I set propositions for myself in painting which are about discovering what is real.”*

*Jacqueline Humphries in conversation with Uta Grosenick, Germany 2000.