Jacqueline Humphries

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 drawing belongs to a body of work that incorporates emoticons and their more recent offshoots, emojis. Although seemingly a departure from abstraction, the combination of shapes derived from punctuation underscores the expressive potential of non-figurative marks, as well as highlighting the ways in which such symbols have become substitutes for direct human emotion.