Hor. #4 1/2

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 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 jewel-like example of Humphries’s work from the later 1990s is part of a series of pictures each titled Hor, followed by a series number. For each work in the group, Humphries layered wide brushstrokes of single color on top of additional fields of wet paint so that the bristles of the brush began to blend the layers. These works, the present example included, are also marked by razor-sharp lines that run across their centers. They serve to fracture the field of blended brushwork in two and were created by taping off the paint areas in subsequent campaigns—first one half, then the other—serving to remind the viewer once more that the work is at a certain remove from the expressive, emotive gestures of artists such as Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline.