Jaqueline Humphries Survey Plays Hide-and-Seek

I was previously unfamiliar with the architecture of the Aspen Art Museum, having visited only before the current building, designed by Shigeru Ban, opened in 2014. My ignorance turned out to be helpful, enabling me to be properly confused by Jacqueline Humphries’s painting installation TSLA (2025). I first saw it, the night before the artist’s survey show opened, through the plate glass wall at the museum’s entrance: five large canvases (8 by 7 1/2 feet), her usual near-squares) hung closely but not quite touching, and not on a wall but on a structure of bare metal framing studs.

The setup is reminiscent of the presentation of Humphries’s five-panel painting Neiman Marcus (2021) at New York’s Greene Naftali in 2022–23. The paintings themselves register from a distance as even paler and more atmospheric than those of the earlier work, and are marked by seemingly random accumulations of spots and scratches—vaguely Twomblyesque, one might say. Looking through the studs, one can see more paintings, dominated by garish reds, but it seemed clear that those on either side of the room were actually mirror reflections of those on the opposite side. In any case, there is some kind of spatial manipulation going on, and the reality of what I was looking at was hard to parse.

The next day I got a closer view of what I had seen the night before. I could suddenly make out that submerged amidst the seemingly casual array of spots of color—in fact, laboriously arrived at by a process of multilayered stenciling, resulting in a surface as weighty, opaque, and relief-like as the image it bears is immaterial, intangible, and energetic—is an anamorphic distortion of the Tesla logo, as if the symbol of the world’s richest man must mean something like what a skull meant when Hans Holbein the Younger painted The Ambassadors nearly 500 years ago. Plus, I got to see what is otherwise off-limits to civilians visiting the show: At the press preview and the opening, guests were allowed to pass freely through the open wall of metal studs, and the line of five paintings, I realized, bisects the large space from corner to corner, creating a triangular zone behind it that viewers are not normally permitted to enter. We privileged early viewers could see that on the other side of the studs, behind the five softly hued paintings visible from the street, hang five more: the bloody red ones I’d assumed were on one or the other of the far walls. But no: Both of those walls are covered with mirrors, and the red paintings—seemingly the unconscious of the pale ones—were only ever meant to be visible as reflections, and not straight on.

The red paintings, perceived indirectly like the otherwise petrifying Medusa in the polished shield of her assassin Perseus, are reminiscent in palette to a group that were exhibited in 1995–96 at Greene Naftali—a subtle reminder that over the decades, the shifts in Humphries’s work, above all to ever-more-technically mediated ways of working, have always incorporated its earlier aspects; her work is simultaneously speculative and retrospective, just as its visual richness nonetheless incorporates severe doubts about the aesthetic salience of visibility. It explores how painting functions as both disclosure and obfuscation, as a screen on which things can appear and as one that blocks one’s view.

This first room in the Aspen Art Museum is one of three dedicated to Humphries’s show. Adjacent to it, a much smaller space, its walls painted green, houses nine more paintings, all recent and (with one exception) of modest dimensions—these, according to the museum’s accompanying brochure, “generated in part by artificial intelligence, drawing upon and reinterpreting data sets of Humphries’s existing artworks.” They embody in concentrated form the antagonistic collaboration of spontaneity and gesture with an intensely technical mediation, as free of 1980s-style irony as of any willful naivete. These are the works one can confront directly, beyond the game of hide-and-seek proposed by the installation in the first room.

A different mode of indirection crops up in the show’s third room, a basement space—a kind of rec room, you could call it—lit by black light. In it hang11 paintings made between 2005 and 2025 (one of them not painted with blacklight paint and therefore essentially invisible in this environment except as a big, dark rectangle). These are accompanied by seven sculptures, all dated 2025. The sculptures, glowing eerily green, represent piles of lumber with the Tesla logo—a fun house reductio ad absurdum of the notion of artificial nature. As for the paintings, well, that word may apply rather straightforwardly to the earlier ones, made in 2005 and 2015 and painted on linen. But the more recent ones, dated 2019, 2021, and 2025, might more accurately be called sculptures of paintings: pigmented epoxy resin or Aqua-Resin rectangles affixed to the walls. The strange thing about these blacklight paintings or painting-like objects is that they defeat any effort to look at them closely; their own luminescence, attracting the eye, makes them hard to see.

Incorporating digital technology and machine vision into works that never quite renounce their roots in Abstract Expressionism—specifically, in the seemingly irreconcilable ideas of the allover and the gesture—Humphries does not suggest painting’s surrender to the high-end consumer culture embodied by the Tesla logo (a culture she had previously used Neiman Marcus to signify). Nor does she pretend consumerism is something entirely alien to art. Rather, she works on the premise that painting is endlessly inflected and confused by whatever contaminates it, and through that very process renews itself and its powers of resistance.