The Wexner Center for the Arts to present Jacqueline Humphries: jHΩ1:) September 18—January 2, 2022

This fall, the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University will devote its galleries to the first large-scale museum exhibition for vanguard abstract painter Jacqueline Humphries. On view September 18–January 2, 2022, jHΩ1:) will feature over 30 paintings, including a new multipanel installation—her largest to date—created in response to the center’s iconic postmodernist architecture. 

“We’re elated to host this important exhibition, which comes at a key moment in the artist’s career. Jacqueline’s paintings are not just beautiful, but powerful large-scale creations that push the boundaries of abstract painting as we think we know it. To see this work in playful combat with the Wex’s architecture will be an unforgettable experience for viewers,” says Johanna Burton, executive director of the Wexner Center.

The exhibition is curated by guest curator Mark Godfrey, whose recent projects include the critically lauded Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963–1983 and Laura Owens & Vincent van Gogh, which will open June 19 at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles. 

“Jacqueline Humphries is a brilliant painter whom I’ve gotten to know over the past 10 years,” notes Godfrey. “What interests me most of all is how she brings everything we know about digital communication and transformation—aspects of the world we encounter everyday—into abstract painting and makes abstract painting relevant to our world.”

A maverick figure in New York’s downtown scene, Humphries has reworked and revitalized the language of abstract painting over a career that has covered four decades and multiple transformations in style. The Wex’s presentation will focus on the past seven years, highlighting the importance of digital communications and online culture to Humphries’s evolving practice. 

Incorporating the QWERTY keyboard as a means of generating abstract form, some paintings feature emoticons, emoji, kaomoji, and CAPTCHA. Humphries produces others by scanning her earlier works, translating them into ASCII character code, and using stencils created from the results as the basis for new compositions. As the New York Times notes, “few painters today engage with the challenges of new technology as persuasively as Jacqueline Humphries.”

The exhibition will also feature Humphries’s recent work exploring the visual language of logos; her black light paintings, made with fluorescent paints to be presented in a darkened space; and a selection of protest sign paintings. These invoke art’s long history as a medium of dissent as well as the uprisings that have increasingly shaped modern politics.

For this presentation, Humphries, Godfrey, and the Wex team have fixed on and multiplied the wedge shape of architect Peter Eisenman’s design of the center, creating semi-discrete galleries within galleries. Per Godfrey, “This is a famously tricky building. Instead of pretending it’s a white cube, why not really work with the building in all its strangeness, and why not make it even stranger?”

A major catalogue featuring essays by Godfrey, Hamza Walker, Jenny Nachtigall, and Johanna Burton along with a conversation between Humphries and Donna De Salvo will accompany the exhibition. Designed by Studio Markus Weisbeck, this extensively illustrated catalogue offers an up-close view of Humphries’ recent practice. The catalogue will be co-published by Gregory R. Miller & Company and the Wexner Center for the Arts.

A robust lineup of talks and events will also occur throughout the exhibition’s run.

Jacqueline Humphries: jHΩ1:) is organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts and curated by Mark Godfrey with assistance from Associate Curator of Exhibitions Daniel Marcus and Curatorial Associate Kristin Helmick-Brunet. Organizational support for the exhibition is provided by Greene Naftali, New York; Modern Art, London; and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.