Jacqueline Humphries is known for her large-scale canvases that consider the history of painting in the context of contemporary, often digitally-mediated viewer experiences. Her paintings juxtapose handmade and mechanical gestures in densely layered, all-over compositions developed from a visual vocabulary that includes real and stencilled paint pours, images of white noise, typographical characters, emojis, and emoticons. Describing her practice, Humphries has said, ‘I’ve tried to recast and remould the vocabulary of painting so it is not condemned to a binary choice between nostalgic, expressive vitality and death by mechanical reproduction.’

To make her paintings, Humphries creates stencils with a laser cutter, through which she pushes paint onto her canvases. Many of her works feature what the artist refers to as ‘latent images,’ recessions or reliefs in the under layers of paint that are then revealed in ensuing distortions in the overlayed, stenciled grid. The resulting surfaces are highly textured and acutely detailed, causing the works to resist photography. ’

‘Screens are both our main way of communicating and the biggest barricade to communication,’ Humphries has said, ‘I use painting to create a different kind of screen that adheres to a more tactile mode of contact.’

The exhibition also includes a suite of nine new aquatint etchings derived from screenwriter and film director Paul Schrader’s original hand-written film outlines.

Jacqueline Humphries (b. 1960) lives and works in New York. Her work was included in the central exhibition of the 2022 Venice Biennale and in the 2014 biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She has been exhibited at museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou in Paris, National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Tate Modern in London, among others. One-person exhibitions include the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Dia in Bridgehampton, New York, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Jacqueline Humphries will be on view at 1062 North Orange Grove and 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard from February 20 through April 5, 2025, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.