Self-Portrait

Jacqueline Humphries is a contemporary American artist celebrated for bringing gestural abstraction into the present day. Her paintings, which have at times incorporated metallic or ultraviolet paints, typically combine broad, expressive marks with rigid geometric elements redolent of digital technology. She has said, "The objective is to knit wildly varying perspectives into a unified space." This work, which she created as part of a Vogue magazine commission for self-portraits by ten leading female artists, represents a rare instance of figuration. However, it is characteristic of Humphries' bold and technologically-informed approach to picture making in that she superimposed digitally drawn and printed eyes and eyebrows over a pattern of oil paint that was transferred to the sheet from an aqueous surface.