Artist Jacqueline Humphries: ‘They told me I had to stop painting’

Like many observers who watched footage of climate protesters throwing tomato soup across the glass-covered surface of Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” at London’s National Gallery last autumn, painter Jacqueline Humphries was horrified — at first. Then her horror turned to fascination. Before long, she began to feel a certain kinship with the young agitators.

Humphries has dedicated her nearly 40-year career to the question of how painting can remain captivating in an age of perpetual technological distraction. She couldn’t help but admire the way the bright orange paint looked as it dripped over Charles Ray’s stainless steel “Horse and Rider” (2014) after activists attacked the sculpture in Paris last November. Their marks, she thought, resembled the ones she makes. And people could not look away from them.

“I don’t want art to be destroyed, but I want art to be engaged with in profound ways,” Humphries says at her airy studio in the industrial neighbourhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn. For a painter so interested in spatters and mess, she looks remarkably tidy in crisp black Prada pants and a matching top. “They are saying art is powerful, and that is a net plus in a world where images are everywhere.”

The protesters’ shock tactics are the inspiration for a new body of work in Humphries’ two-venue solo exhibition at Modern Art on Helmet Row and Bury Street in London (June 3-July 22), which coincides with London Gallery Weekend (June 2-4). It is the latest in a trio of exhibitions Humphries has completed this year, first at Greene Naftali in New York and then at Palazzo Degas in Naples. Greene Naftali and Modern Art are also due to present her work at the Art Basel fair in Switzerland (June 15-18).

Humphries calls these paintings “pre-vandalised”: compositions in hues such as rose, mustard and sage with ghostly black paint oozing down the front. It looks as if an oily black substance was hurled at the canvas and then wiped off, leaving behind a stain. In some pictures, a baby’s tiny hand hovers outstretched at the edge — a nod to the protesters of the future, as well as the current demonstrators’ penchant for gluing themselves to works of art.

“The more I work with it, the more compassion I have,” Humphries says. “It made me think about my own destructive impulses.”

While Humphries does not reveal the source of those impulses (“You’d have to ask my therapist”), they have been brewing for some time. She shows me a snapshot of her in front of an imposing bank building on a visit to Zurich 20 years ago. It had been vandalised with bold, large splashes of red paint. In the photo, she is leaning against the wall with a slight smirk on her face, clearly delighted that the sparkling clean city had been given an unwelcome jolt of colour.

Humphries grew up in New Orleans, raised by an artist mother and a father who worked at an investment firm by day and played jazz by night. She never felt like she fitted in. But when her mother took her to a museum in Houston, and later when she spent time in Paris as an exchange student, she finally found a community that she felt connected to: painters such as Manet, Chardin and Cézanne. “By then, I was obsessed,” she recalls.

There was just one problem. She attended art school at a time when painting couldn’t have been less in fashion. In fact, the prevailing conclusion was that painting was dead. In mid-1980s New York City, the most respected artists were Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and others who employed the visual language of advertising to create photographs, videos and collages that revealed the manufactured nature of images. Abstract painting was dismissed as too tactile, too retro and too earnest.

After Humphries enrolled in the notoriously theory-focused Whitney Independent Study Program in 1985, a group of students staged an intervention. “A bunch of the fellows got together one day and marched into my studio as a group and told me I had to stop painting,” she says. Her reaction must have surprised them. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is great, I’m doing something right! They took the time to pay attention.’” The pushback she received inspired a new series of paintings that got progressively smaller and smaller — a literal interpretation of the pressure she felt as a painter to disappear.

Since then, Humphries has made it her mission to keep painting vital in our attention-addled digital age. She has used reflective silver paint and fluorescent paint visible only under black light to recreate the glow we experience when we look at an iPhone or computer screen. She has peppered her canvases with the debris of our digital lives, including emoticons, emojis and captchas, those distorted phrases we type to prove to a website that we are not robots. More recently, she began painting tiny dots across her surfaces while they were still wet. The veil effect invites the viewer’s eyes to glaze over the composition as one might while scrolling TikTok.

“It’s awful, the way social media is designed to keep us addicted to looking at the screen,” Humphries says. “But I want the same damn thing: I want someone to be frozen looking at my thing.”

Humphries’ studio looks like a mash-up of a mad scientist’s lair, a Swedish design studio and a forensics lab. As we enter, we pass a 3D printer whose nozzle is whirring back and forth, hard at work. Taped to the wall nearby is a massive sheet of paper labelled “Blood Spatters”, with an elaborate menu of daubs and drips taken from forensics websites. Next to it hangs a similar menu for emojis. Humphries uses these menus like a painter’s palette, selecting her image of choice and sometimes manipulating it further on the computer. The result is fed into one of the studio’s commercial laser cutters to create a stencil that she uses to apply the paint to the canvas.

Humphries felt strangely encouraged that the climate protesters chose art as the vehicle to raise an alarm about the existential danger facing humanity. She remains dubious, however, about painting’s ability to save the world. “It’s not defensible what they’re doing, but neither is art in the first place,” she says. Her work has a more modest aim that is, in fact, quite radical: to prompt people to look at the world around them more carefully.

In a final bid to frustrate the contemporary viewer, Humphries creates works that firmly resist being photographed. Through the phone screen, the layers and textures flatten and the tension between the handmade pours and stencilled marks disappears. The surfaces look surprisingly dull. The artist hopes it will be enough to prompt viewers to look away from their devices and back out at the world.

modernart.net; londongalleryweekend.art