1992

Humphries has built an impressive career on challenging and revising the legacies of gestural abstraction of the American mid-century. In her works from the early 1990s on, various strategies of intervention—stenciling, screening, taping off areas of the canvas, rotating the canvas while painting, and many others—serve to move her practice beyond Abstract Expressionism’s impulsive brushstrokes, splashes, or fields of color to something more deliberate and mediated.

This diminutive but powerful example of Humphries’s work is part of a group of works in which the artist began applying areas of a white priming layer with long vertical strokes starting at left. These layers of varied thickness spill partially around the turning edges and stop near the center of the canvas. Without smoothing down the gesso, Humphries applied layers of thinned-down oil paint on top of it in deep, rusty reds, allowing her brushstrokes to run and bleed. These fields of blood-colored medium also carry over onto the turning edges and into the unprimed area at right, where the artist again left raw canvas in reserve. The result is a meditation on the potential for gestures of paint to evoke the specter of the body, its fluids, and the history of the medium, all while using a mode then widely thought to have been more than exhausted: abstraction.