Jacqueline Humphries

Jacqueline Humphries (born November 17, 1960, in New Orleans) is an American abstract painter married to Tony Oursler. She is known for large-scale paintings that reference the history of abstraction, combining traditional painterly techniques with contemporary technologies. She has used metallic silver pigment to suggest the glow of a cinema screen, and incorporated emoticons, emoji, kaomoji, and CAPTCHA tests into recent works that draw on digital communication. Other paintings are produced by scanning her earlier canvases, translating them into ASCII character code, and using custom laser-cut stencils of the resulting images as the basis for new paintings. Humphries lives and works in New York City, where she is represented by Greene Naftali Gallery.

Humphries's work has been included in major exhibitions in the United States and internationally, including the Venice Biennale (2022) and the Whitney Biennial (2014). She was the subject of a major one-person survey exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, in 2021. A solo exhibition of Humphries's Black Light paintings took place at Dia Bridgehampton, New York in 2019, a body of work which the artist had previously shown at NYEHAUS in 2005, which John Kelsey described in Artforum as "the most memorable painting show in New York". Humphries's first comprehensive solo presentation at a United States museum took place at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh in 2015, and later travelled to the Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; and Tate Modern, London.