Jacqueline Humphries

Jacqueline Humphries, born in 1960 in New Orleans, Louisiana, is an American abstract painter known for her innovative approach to traditional painting practices. Her work has significantly impacted contemporary painting, exploring the boundaries of abstraction and engaging with themes of light, technology, and digital culture.

Humphries attended Parsons School of Design in New York City, where she was exposed to the dynamic art scene of the 1980s. Her early influences include the Abstract Expressionists and the New York School painters, but she quickly developed her distinctive voice within the abstract genre.

Since the beginning of her career, Humphries has been devoted to the exploration of the history of painting and its place in an increasingly digital society. Though working with traditional materials, her large-scale abstractions canvases refer to the unstable nature of light and the ways in which the environment affects a finished painting.

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’. Another notable series is her ‘black light’ paintings, created using ultraviolet light-sensitive paint. This series exemplifies Humphries’ interest in how technology and light can transform the viewing experience and challenge viewers’ perceptions of colour and space.

Humphries’ work has been widely exhibited in prominent galleries and museums. She participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and her works are part of the permanent collections of the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern in London.

Freely combining different media and techniques with references to pop culture and art history, Jacqueline Humphries’ art reflects the experience of the digital age, capturing the distortion, seduction and multiplicity of a world viewed through screens.