Jacqueline Humphries

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Jacqueline Humphries, the next exhibition in his galleries at 1062 North Orange Grove and 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. Featuring twelve new paintings, this exhibition is the artist’s first at the gallery and her first one-person exhibition in Los Angeles in more than thirty years.

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 hand-made and mechanical gestures in densely layered, all-over compositions developed from a visual vocabulary that includes real and stenciled paint pours, images of white noise, typographical characters, emojis, and emoticons. Describing her practice, Humphries has said, “I’ve tried to recast and remold 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 made in collaboration with the screenwriter and film director, Paul Schrader, based on his original hand-written film outlines.