Work

At the Carnegie Museum of Art, I observed Jacqueline Humphries’s “( )”. Composed of oil on linen, it features black and red drips of paint, all on a silvery, reflective background. The black drips are the larger of the two, with many of them merging together to form blobs of black paint; the red is applied in a more dot-like pattern. Together, the two colors seem arranged in columns, though the red stands out more as the top-most layer of paint. The red paint is also confined within a border on the canvas that contains no red paint. In addition, there are several seemingly random white blotches scattered throughout the canvas. Many of these are not visible from certain angles, with the metallic background reflecting light in such a way that the white blends in.