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Lot Essay
‘Painting is my machine for thinking’ (Jacqueline Humphries)
A dazzling spectacle of light, colour and form, the present work is a mesmerising large-scale example of Jacqueline Humphries’ ‘dot’ paintings. Created in 2014, the year of her presentation at the Whitney Biennal, its shifting, kaleidoscopic surface immerses the viewer in a world of optical illusion. Humphries responds directly to the aesthetics of the digital age: her works draw together a variety of media, techniques and cultural references, capturing the flux of a world filtered increasingly through screens. Made using an industrial stencil cutter, her ‘dot’ paintings flicker with echoes of Sigmar Polke, Roy Lichtenstein and Jackson Pollock, while simultaneously evoking electronic codes, pixels and data. Here, the grid of tiny dots resembles a sweeping painterly gesture, imitating the dripping swathes of pink that flood the canvas behind it. Rows of larger, hand-painted dots quiver below upon a silvery ground, like an analogue echo fading into the past. The result is a thrilling vision of painting at the crossroads, caught between real and virtual domains.
Humphries studied at Parsons School of Design, New York during the 1980s before enrolling on the Whitney Independent Study Programme. Working against the prevailing trends of conceptual art, she embraced painting: a medium which many had long declared dead. Coming to prominence in the 1990s, Humphries took her place alongside Christopher Wool, Charline von Heyl, Laura Owens and other artists who were similarly committed to opening up new possibilities for abstraction. Following her celebrated ‘silver’ and ‘black light’ paintings—which saw her experiment with metallic and fluorescent paint as well as UV lighting—she began to work with repeated stencil patterns, overlaying them with complex layers of colour and texture. ‘I had this feeling that I wasn’t painting’, she recalls. ‘The feeling was that I was breeding something … Different stencils and different-sized dots felt like DNA that I could combine in a painting’ (J. Humphries, quoted in A. Russeth, ‘“The Thrilling Feeling of Creating Light”: Jacqueline Humphries on Her Recent Work’, ARTnews, 7 October 2015).
Humphries’ embrace of dots opened new doors within her practice. In certain works, they morph into tiny emoticons or punctuation marks, like a text message gone awry. Elsewhere, the artist has embraced ‘ASCII’ art, feeding digital images of previous paintings into software that spits them out into a coded grid: the pattern subsequently forms the basis of her stencils. Like Owens and Wool, as well as others such as Wade Guyton, Albert Oehlen, Urs Fischer and Avery Singer, Humphries is fascinated by the relationship between painting and technology. Yet while the present work conjures cinema and computer screens, it also celebrates the visceral, alchemical complexities of oil on canvas, delighting in its slippages, schisms and elusive marbled effects. Washes of colour blend and intermingle with the same luminous beauty once achieved by Claude Monet and Mark Rothko. Orders old and new join hands in the work’s scintillating surface, offering a model for how painting might continue to expand its horizons in a rapidly changing world.
A dazzling spectacle of light, colour and form, the present work is a mesmerising large-scale example of Jacqueline Humphries’ ‘dot’ paintings. Created in 2014, the year of her presentation at the Whitney Biennal, its shifting, kaleidoscopic surface immerses the viewer in a world of optical illusion. Humphries responds directly to the aesthetics of the digital age: her works draw together a variety of media, techniques and cultural references, capturing the flux of a world filtered increasingly through screens. Made using an industrial stencil cutter, her ‘dot’ paintings flicker with echoes of Sigmar Polke, Roy Lichtenstein and Jackson Pollock, while simultaneously evoking electronic codes, pixels and data. Here, the grid of tiny dots resembles a sweeping painterly gesture, imitating the dripping swathes of pink that flood the canvas behind it. Rows of larger, hand-painted dots quiver below upon a silvery ground, like an analogue echo fading into the past. The result is a thrilling vision of painting at the crossroads, caught between real and virtual domains.
Humphries studied at Parsons School of Design, New York during the 1980s before enrolling on the Whitney Independent Study Programme. Working against the prevailing trends of conceptual art, she embraced painting: a medium which many had long declared dead. Coming to prominence in the 1990s, Humphries took her place alongside Christopher Wool, Charline von Heyl, Laura Owens and other artists who were similarly committed to opening up new possibilities for abstraction. Following her celebrated ‘silver’ and ‘black light’ paintings—which saw her experiment with metallic and fluorescent paint as well as UV lighting—she began to work with repeated stencil patterns, overlaying them with complex layers of colour and texture. ‘I had this feeling that I wasn’t painting’, she recalls. ‘The feeling was that I was breeding something … Different stencils and different-sized dots felt like DNA that I could combine in a painting’ (J. Humphries, quoted in A. Russeth, ‘“The Thrilling Feeling of Creating Light”: Jacqueline Humphries on Her Recent Work’, ARTnews, 7 October 2015).
Humphries’ embrace of dots opened new doors within her practice. In certain works, they morph into tiny emoticons or punctuation marks, like a text message gone awry. Elsewhere, the artist has embraced ‘ASCII’ art, feeding digital images of previous paintings into software that spits them out into a coded grid: the pattern subsequently forms the basis of her stencils. Like Owens and Wool, as well as others such as Wade Guyton, Albert Oehlen, Urs Fischer and Avery Singer, Humphries is fascinated by the relationship between painting and technology. Yet while the present work conjures cinema and computer screens, it also celebrates the visceral, alchemical complexities of oil on canvas, delighting in its slippages, schisms and elusive marbled effects. Washes of colour blend and intermingle with the same luminous beauty once achieved by Claude Monet and Mark Rothko. Orders old and new join hands in the work’s scintillating surface, offering a model for how painting might continue to expand its horizons in a rapidly changing world.