Jacqueline Humphries

Jacqueline Humphries: jHO1:)

A maverick figure in New York's downtown scene, Humphries has revitalized the language of abstract painting over a career that has covered four decades and multiple transformations in style

Published on the occasion of Jacqueline Humphries' (born 1960) new exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Parrish Art Museum, this major catalog surveys the artist's work from the past seven years, including dozens of new paintings and her largest multipanel installations to date.
Incorporating the QWERTY keyboard as a means of generating abstract forms, Humphries' recent paintings integrate emoticons, emoji, CAPTCHAs and ASCII text as layers of mark-making in dense and vivid works. Other new works explore the visual language of corporate logos; black light paintings presented in darkened space; and a selection of protest sign paintings that invoke the uprisings that shape our current political landscape.
The title is a CAPTCHA code invented by Humphries that brings together her initials, the last Greek letter in its alphabet, omega, which she uses to refer to the idea of the "end" of painting and her continuing refusal of this end, the number 1, which stands for the idea of a beginning, and her favorite emoticon: ). The book features essays by exhibition curator Mark Godfrey, Courtney J. Martin, Jenny Nachtigall and former Wexner Center Director Johanna Burton. Designed by Studio Markus Weisbeck, this extensively illustrated monograph offers an up-close view of Humphries' continued evolution in painting.