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Descriptif du lot
Shimmering with dazzling tones of silver and red, Dirty Mind is an electrifying work by Jacqueline Humphries. Wild, gestural streaks and drips of colour are intercepted by horizontal and diagonal striations, cutting across the texture like ribbons. Light and shadow dance over the picture plane, imbuing it with depth and motion. Executed in 2008, the work takes its place within a subseries of Humphries’ celebrated ‘silver’ paintings, themselves inspired by the aesthetics of cinema. In this particular group, writes Frances Guerin, ‘Humphries took the motif of light dancing over wet pavement in the dark of the night. The glistening of wet streets and the clandestine events of film noir are invoked, hiding behind or in front of these surfaces’ (F. Guerin, Jacqueline Humphries, London 2022, p. 56). In Dirty Mind, the seduction and dramatic intrigue of Hollywood’s golden age comes to life as painterly abstraction, its surface flickering like a screen.
Recently the subject of a major exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum—her largest solo show to date—Humphries belongs to a generation of artists who redefined abstraction for the twenty-first century. A contemporary of Charline von Heyl, Rudolf Stingel, Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool, her works are characterised by their visual dialogue with technology. Her earliest paintings, begun in the 1980s, consisted of large hand-painted dots based on mechanical keypunch holes: an early method of data encryption. In more recent works, she has explored the creative potential of emoticons, ASCII code and blacklight. The silver paintings, however—begun during the 2000s—remain some of her most arresting works. Humphries applies the colour first, followed by the metallic paint, before scraping the surface in a manner that blurs the distinction between foreground and background. The results call to mind the effects of watching a film, in which three-dimensional illusions flicker at speed across a two-dimensional surface. As Guerin explains, ‘Humphries wants an audience to watch her paintings unfold like a movie’ (F. Guerin, ibid.).
As a student during the 1980s, Humphries was aware that painting’s future seemed uncertain. Against the raging currents of theory and conceptualism, she looked back, finding early inspiration in the painters of the New York School. She admired ‘how a Barnett Newman can be so aggressive, and also inviting; the way a Pollock messes with your mind and body; the kind of direct address of a Guston.’ It is perhaps no coincidence, she explains elsewhere, that the birth of Abstract Expressionism was contemporaneous with the flourishing of film noir. Both genres sought to collapse the relationship between figure and ground, often through the use of light. Speaking of her silver paintings, Humphries notes that ‘there is a physics to how the metallic paint reflects light that is completely different from conventional pigment. It picks up light in unpredictable ways, sometimes coming forward very aggressively, at other times going more dead grey and giving way for the colour to advance’ (J. Humphries, quoted in ‘Jacqueline Humphries by Cecily Brown’, BOMB Magazine, 1 April 2009, online). These dynamics are at play in Dirty Mind, which dematerialises and rematerialises before our eyes.
Recently the subject of a major exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum—her largest solo show to date—Humphries belongs to a generation of artists who redefined abstraction for the twenty-first century. A contemporary of Charline von Heyl, Rudolf Stingel, Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool, her works are characterised by their visual dialogue with technology. Her earliest paintings, begun in the 1980s, consisted of large hand-painted dots based on mechanical keypunch holes: an early method of data encryption. In more recent works, she has explored the creative potential of emoticons, ASCII code and blacklight. The silver paintings, however—begun during the 2000s—remain some of her most arresting works. Humphries applies the colour first, followed by the metallic paint, before scraping the surface in a manner that blurs the distinction between foreground and background. The results call to mind the effects of watching a film, in which three-dimensional illusions flicker at speed across a two-dimensional surface. As Guerin explains, ‘Humphries wants an audience to watch her paintings unfold like a movie’ (F. Guerin, ibid.).
As a student during the 1980s, Humphries was aware that painting’s future seemed uncertain. Against the raging currents of theory and conceptualism, she looked back, finding early inspiration in the painters of the New York School. She admired ‘how a Barnett Newman can be so aggressive, and also inviting; the way a Pollock messes with your mind and body; the kind of direct address of a Guston.’ It is perhaps no coincidence, she explains elsewhere, that the birth of Abstract Expressionism was contemporaneous with the flourishing of film noir. Both genres sought to collapse the relationship between figure and ground, often through the use of light. Speaking of her silver paintings, Humphries notes that ‘there is a physics to how the metallic paint reflects light that is completely different from conventional pigment. It picks up light in unpredictable ways, sometimes coming forward very aggressively, at other times going more dead grey and giving way for the colour to advance’ (J. Humphries, quoted in ‘Jacqueline Humphries by Cecily Brown’, BOMB Magazine, 1 April 2009, online). These dynamics are at play in Dirty Mind, which dematerialises and rematerialises before our eyes.