Greene Naftali
Exhibition
JACQUELINE HUMPHRIES
Ground Floor
Press Release
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Greene Naftali is pleased to announce its eighth solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Jacqueline Humphries.
For this exhibition, Humphries debuts ten large-scale paintings that encounter the spatial and temporal logic of a world increasingly dominated by screens. These works reflect simultaneously real and digital realities, where electronically produced images seem to overlay or supersede other images—or even real space—from within mechanized forms of communication and depiction.
Atomized structures of thick opaque paint form planar layers that are transparent to the passages underneath them, giving the sense of perceiving two or more wholly intact images at the same time. Text or language characters which constitute the rudiments of abbreviated communication—emoticons, x's, and dots of varying size and scale—stretch over the entirety of the canvas, commingling digital lexicons with the painted surface. And fields of color in various shades of fluorescent pink, purple, green, and blue pop into and out of focus, recalling the increasingly frenzied pace of contemporary image intake. By translating these modes of communication onto the canvas, Humphries mines the endemic distraction and proliferation of ever-emerging and fading images in a digital age.
For over three decades, Humphries has committed to abstraction at its extreme: building up, scraping away, and reworking her surfaces in a process of perpetual undoing. Subjecting the canvas to a range of painted actions and erasures upon it, Humphries tests the limits of painting, always interested in synthesizing physical and psychological space onto the painted field.
Jacqueline Humphries lives and works in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions include Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London (2014); Greene Naftali, New York (2012); and Prospect.1 New Orleans, LA (2008). Her work was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and this June she will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Tate Modern, London; Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Smithsonian Institution, D.C.