Jacqueline Humphries
(American/Louisiana, b. 1965)

"Untitled #14", 1993

oil on linen
signed, titled and dated en verso, affixed with "Galerie Simonne Stern, New Orleans, Louisiana" gallery label.
Unframed.
60" x 60"

Provenance: Galerie Simonne Stern, New Orleans, Louisiana; Private collection, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Literature: Cecily Brown, "Jacqueline Humphries", BOMB, No. 107 (Spring, 2009), pp. 22-31.

Notes: What I'm after is a kind of psychological hook.
--Jacqueline Humphries

The work offered here is from Humphries' early period, shortly after the completion of her art training and two years before her significant solo exhibition at the newly formed Greene Naftali Gallery in New York. Her dogged determination and persistence as a woman artist from the South working in New York in an abstract manner cannot be stressed enough; she was attending art school at a time when abstraction was moving away from the painterly and few women were working in the style.

The large-scale canvases she was creating at this time are carefully and intentionally composed works which simultaneously reference and toy with the tenets of Abstract-Expressionism. Here she has chosen a limited palette of creams, tans, browns in thickly applied layers to form a vertical composition that delicately nudges the viewer's eye along the drips and droplets rendered in dense inky black.

Humphries' large-scale lyrical canvases demand an active viewer; as the artist once stated about her work, "I like the unstable situation that depends on the light and the viewer both moving around."

No signs of past restoration. Surface dirt visible along edges of left side (raw canvas); areas of thick paint have craquelure including upper center and mid center/right.