Frieze New York | Booth C07: Virginia Jaramillo

For Frieze New York 2026, Hales is proud to present a solo booth of recent paintings by the trailblazing American artist Virginia Jaramillo (b. 1939). Across a seven-decade career, Jaramillo has pursued a rigorous and sustained exploration of abstraction, informed by her interest in the physical and spiritual dimensions of the world. This will mark Jaramillo’s first solo presentation in New York since 2020 and follows her touring U.S. retrospective (2023–25). 

The presentation focuses on paintings on canvas from 2021 to the present, foregrounding Jaramillo’s ongoing investigation into space—how it is structured, perceived, and felt. Central to the booth is Quanta (2021), a 12-foot-wide painting in which dense, multicolored lines traverse the canvas, cutting across a tactile white ground. These lines shoot from one side of the composition to the other, activating the surface as they converge on passages of airy yellow and black that seem to press against—and expand beyond—the picture plane. The title references quantum mechanics, evoking energies and forces that remain unseen yet deeply felt. Originally conceived for Jaramillo’s solo exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum, Quanta toured in the first two venues of her recent U.S. retrospective (2023–25). 

In dialogue with Quanta, Jaramillo presents a new, intimate series of curvilinear paintings, the Point Omega Studies. Meticulously constructed, these works feature bold color fields across which finely calibrated lines move, wrap around the edges of the canvas, and extend the pictorial space outward. In works such as 001 – Asymptotic Drift and 004 – Oblique Convergence, lines travel across the surface in dynamic waves, crossing and recrossing one another. In others, including 006 – Nonlinear Intersection and 007 – Limit Point, they gently meet before diverging again. These compositions draw on forms that have existed in Jaramillo’s practice since the 1970s, first explored in sketchbooks and now revisited. If Quanta proposes space as expansive and immersive, the Point Omega Studies reflect Jaramillo’s engagement with the Japanese concept of Ma: space not as emptiness, but as a charged interval—an active field between forms that gives structure and meaning to the whole. 

Born in Texas, Jaramillo lived in California before moving to Europe and settling in New York in the 1960s, where she became involved in the city’s dynamic artistic milieu. Her work was included in the 1972 Whitney Annual and the landmark 1971 DeLuxe Show in Houston, one of the first racially integrated exhibitions in the United States, organized with the support of the Menil family. 

Recent institutional recognition includes her touring retrospective, presented at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, Charlotte (2023–25), as well as a solo exhibition at the Menil Collection, Houston (2020). She has also been included in major international exhibitions such as Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles (Hammer Museum, 2011); Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (Tate Modern, touring, 2017–20); We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–85 (Brooklyn Museum, 2017–18); and Women in Abstraction (Centre Pompidou, 2021). Her work is held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among many others. 

Jaramillo lives and works in Hampton Bays, New York.