Jacqueline Humphries wants us to consider the power of disruptive mark-making.
Taking over both spaces at Modern Art in London, the exhibition, Jacqueline Humphries (3 June–22 July 2023), invites us to closely inspect the colour, scale, surface, texture, and gesture of her paintings.
We see layered images inscribed with inventory numbers in fluorescent hues. In the way Humphries handles the paint—it's flung, splattered, and scraped on linen—it's easy to see a suggestion of vandalism, ostensibly defacing the images beneath.
Humphries describes the works as 'pre vandalised paintings', mapping out the marks made by soup, glue, and greasy black, oily liquids previously flung at museum masterpieces in climate change protests (red paint was recently smeared on a Monet painting at the National Museum in Stockholm, Sweden).
Humphries' paintings investigate how we may consider these gestures as artworks themselves.
