[//], 2014

Oil on linen
© Jacqueline Humphries; courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo by Jason Mandella.

Over the past four decades, Jacqueline Humphries has reinvigorated the language of abstraction as an influential member of an increasingly celebrated generation of painters. She is best known for works that engage with the challenges and potentials of new technologies, connecting abstraction to the realm of contemporary digital culture. Using a wide variety of mark-making techniques, both instinctive and carefully considered, Humphries covers her canvases with brushstrokes, drips and pours of paint, and stenciled passages; she also removes paint by smudging, scratching, and sponging. In 2014 she also adopted laser-cut stencils, which she produced to her specifications, to structure her paintings. Created at that moment, [//] refers to notations in computer coding languages such as JavaScript and Python and is related to Humphries’s interest in the conventions of mark making and looking. Humphries decided to “make a painting and then stencil the canvas over top, as if the whole surface of the painting were inverted or flipped in on itself.”