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Lot Essay
A dazzling spectacle of light, texture and form, Chimera is a mesmerising large-scale example of Jacqueline Humphries’ celebrated ‘silver’ paintings. Created in 2008, its shifting, kaleidoscopic surface extends to almost two and half metres in width, immersing the viewer in a world of shimmering optical fantasy. Having risen to prominence in the 1990s, Humphries is part of a generation of painters—including Rudolf Stingel, Laura Owens, Charline von Heyl and Christopher Wool—who opened up new directions for abstraction during this period; her first large-scale museum at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, concluded this January. Freely combining different media and techniques with references to pop culture and art history, her work reflects the experience of the digital age, capturing the distortion, seduction and multiplicity of a world viewed through screens. Here, hallucinogenic washes of silver, black and purple combine to create a rich, cinematic space: a chimeric illusion seemingly poised between real and virtual domains.
Born in New Orleans, Humphries graduated from Parsons School of Design, New York, in 1985, before enrolling on the Whitney Independent Study Programme. There, she pursued painting against the tide of theory and conceptualism that was rife at the time, working against the widely-held belief that the medium had long been consigned to the history books. Her ‘silver’ paintings, begun during the mid-2000s, represent the culmination of her long-standing fascination with metallic paint: a medium that allowed her to create a space ‘where the light isn’t in the painting, but remains outside it’. As she explains, ‘I start a painting by finishing it, then may proceed to unfinish it … as a kind of escape from that finitude, or wiping down the canvas, getting at what is behind the painting, what is the real of the canvas and support … I ask myself questions: does painting even have an interior? Is it all exterior? Can you enter it, or are you just up against a wall?’ (J. Humphries, quoted in P. Soto, ‘Painting in Silver and Noir: Q+A with Jacqueline Humphries’, Art in America, 27 April 2012). Such questions come to the fore in Chimera, where all sense of physical canvas dissolves into a free-floating mirage.
Humphries has also spoken of film noir as a reference point for her ‘silver’ paintings, noting the genre’s use of lighting to collapse the distinction between figure and ground. The protagonist in such films, she explains, ‘is often in shadow when he is speaking, and he is completely embedded in the atmosphere and light of the frame’ (J. Humphries, quoted ibid.). It is perhaps no coincidence, she points out, that the flourishing of film noir coincided with the birth of Abstract Expressionism, where form and depth similarly became indistinguishable from one another. Such influences are palpable in Chimera: from Humphries’ sweeping brushstrokes, redolent of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, to the shimmering surface that evokes the mysterious alchemies of the silver screen. Barely-recognisable forms plummet in and out of shadow, at once material and immaterial. It is a vivid expression of the flux and instability that underpins human vision, played out in glistening, lustrous painterly waves.
Born in New Orleans, Humphries graduated from Parsons School of Design, New York, in 1985, before enrolling on the Whitney Independent Study Programme. There, she pursued painting against the tide of theory and conceptualism that was rife at the time, working against the widely-held belief that the medium had long been consigned to the history books. Her ‘silver’ paintings, begun during the mid-2000s, represent the culmination of her long-standing fascination with metallic paint: a medium that allowed her to create a space ‘where the light isn’t in the painting, but remains outside it’. As she explains, ‘I start a painting by finishing it, then may proceed to unfinish it … as a kind of escape from that finitude, or wiping down the canvas, getting at what is behind the painting, what is the real of the canvas and support … I ask myself questions: does painting even have an interior? Is it all exterior? Can you enter it, or are you just up against a wall?’ (J. Humphries, quoted in P. Soto, ‘Painting in Silver and Noir: Q+A with Jacqueline Humphries’, Art in America, 27 April 2012). Such questions come to the fore in Chimera, where all sense of physical canvas dissolves into a free-floating mirage.
Humphries has also spoken of film noir as a reference point for her ‘silver’ paintings, noting the genre’s use of lighting to collapse the distinction between figure and ground. The protagonist in such films, she explains, ‘is often in shadow when he is speaking, and he is completely embedded in the atmosphere and light of the frame’ (J. Humphries, quoted ibid.). It is perhaps no coincidence, she points out, that the flourishing of film noir coincided with the birth of Abstract Expressionism, where form and depth similarly became indistinguishable from one another. Such influences are palpable in Chimera: from Humphries’ sweeping brushstrokes, redolent of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, to the shimmering surface that evokes the mysterious alchemies of the silver screen. Barely-recognisable forms plummet in and out of shadow, at once material and immaterial. It is a vivid expression of the flux and instability that underpins human vision, played out in glistening, lustrous painterly waves.