Jacqueline Humphries integrates gestural abstraction with the effects of new technologies, exploring how painting can capture and complicate the sensory experience of a screen-based world. Neiman Marcus comes from a new body of work anchored in a digitally-enlarged image of white noise––a visual realization of both randomness and constancy, and a trope of television culture and video art of the 1960s and ’70s. Humphries used this image to create a stencil through which she pushed paint onto a primed canvas, juxtaposing traditional brushwork and mechanical application, the larger shapes and the allover pattern. The brand name “Neiman Marcus” in its iconic cursive font––itself evoking both freehand calligraphy and mechanical reproduction––simultaneously emerges from and dissolves into the field of raised black speckles that depict white noise. A luxury retailer in operation for over 100 years, Neiman Marcus’s name remains instantly recognizable yet on the verge of disappearance, its visual instability pointing to the company’s recent hardships. Slashing gray lines span the length of the canvas, coalescing into a signature form seen elsewhere in Humphries’s practice. The lines’ passing resemblance to the department store logo offers sly commentary on personal branding, while evading any direct conflation of artistic and corporate identities.

Rachel Harrison’s Studs sculptures, a series she began in 2015, are made from warped wooden studs the artist finds in hardware stores and lumberyards. These studs are traditionally used to frame walls but, due to their misshapen form, have become void of function. Each of Harrison’s sculptures presents a single defective stud isolated and upright on a constructed base, then coated in cement and painted with bold strokes of vibrant color.

Next Stud’s verticality recalls the standing figures of Alberto Giacometti or Louise Bourgeois’s totem-like forms, and its near-human scale also channels the discourse of anthropomorphism in Minimal sculpture. Harrison’s engagement with art history extends to the work’s surface treatment: her energetic handling and visible brushwork summon midcentury narratives of action painting, and her palette of high-key oranges, greens, blues and purples is almost Fauvist in its embrace of the color spectrum. Harrison’s Studs also point outward to implicate the architecture that surrounds them, drawing attention to the walls that frame and contain works of art. She highlights the studs’ intended infrastructural role in creating conditions of viewing, and recasts them as monuments to the human endeavor to construct and shape our environment.

Walter Price's paintings and drawings tread the line between figuration and abstraction, creating interior worlds that hover on the brink of legibility. His fluid compositions form dynamic grounds for both stray marks and recognizable things: an old-school TV monitor, for instance, or a sketchily-rendered hat (a signature motif) of uncertain origin—part sombrero, part ten-gallon, part Hasidic biber. Price is known for his lush palette, or what Darby English calls “his penchant for punchy color: weighted with value and density, it approaches in sheets or lands with a thud...and it is potent exactly because it talks more to the body and imagination than to the head.” The work’s title, Ground cherries, riffs on the Korean word for the shishito peppers that appear on the TV screen, demonstrating an interest in translatability between languages, across media, and from verbal to visual representation.
 

Michael Krebber’s painting practice strains the medium’s outer limits, recalibrating our standards for what a painting can be when all its known elements are stripped away. Hard Rock belongs to a 2008 series of reliefs made from cut-up windsurfing boards—found objects that Krebber has “carved in slices like tunafish and hung on the wall like Donald Judd sculptures.” The boards’ neat progression of modular units does evoke Minimalist seriality and uniform stacks, but also recalls that, while Judd’s work looks more like sculpture, he considered it nearer to painting. 

Krebber’s surfboards likewise function as surrogate paintings with artistic gesture reduced to a simple partitioning. The brightly-hued, branded objects are relieved of their lifestyle function when severed and mounted on the wall, made to occupy the space of painting even when no paint has been applied. Krebber’s rigorous dismantling of painterly norms is often taken as a sign of refusal or evasion, yet Hard Rock demonstrates that an exacting critique of painting need not be austere. The surfboards’ loud colors and distinctive lozenge shapes invite a certain formal delectation, and the artist has said he finds them “one of the most beautiful images in the world.” 

Since the 1980s, Dan Graham’s pavilions have rigorously examined how architectural spaces shape human behavior. Project for MOMA is an early three-dimensional study for Child’s Play, the artist’s 2015-16 installation for the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art. The maquette offers a scaled-down version of that work’s immersive physical experience. Graham constructs a triangular room and then skews its geometries, warping the sides and opening one vertex. Two exterior walls are made of semi-reflective glass and the third is perforated with tiny holes. Within, he creates a refractory landscape that shifts with each pass of the viewer’s eye. Graham juxtaposes these funhouse optical effects with the sleek anonymity of corporate and public buildings. Coming of age in the 1960s, the artist proceeds from the legacy of his Minimalist peers such as Donald Judd or Larry Bell. Yet Graham was always more invested in the social resonance of their blank, slickly executed forms: his signature use of two-way mirror glass recalls its role in market research settings and interrogation rooms. “My pavilions derive their meaning from the people who look at themselves and others, and who are being looked at,” Graham has said. “Without people in them, they might look a bit like minimal-art sculptures, but that's not what they're meant to be.”