Virginia Jaramillo : Pause in Time
Opening reception: 12 November, 6 – 8pm
Hales is delighted to announce Pause in Time, a solo exhibition of new works by Virginia Jaramillo (b. 1939). Bringing together new curvilinear paintings with collaged linen-fiber works, the exhibition considers space and time as interconnected and non-linear, returning to ideas and materials that have occupied Jaramillo throughout her seven-decade career. Jaramillo's work is currently on view in Hard Art at MoMA PS1, New York.
Jaramillo has approached abstraction as a means of investigating the physical, perceptual, and philosophical structures that shape our understanding of the world. Throughout her trailblazing practice, space is not understood as empty or passive, but as something active: defined through relationships, intervals, and points of connection. The exhibition brings this sustained inquiry into focus dialectically, through two visually distinct, almost opposing bodies of work.
In Jaramillo's newest paintings, precisely drawn painted curvilinear lines traverse expansive fields of color. Entering and departing the edges of the canvas, the energetic lines suggest trajectories that extend beyond what is immediately visible. They curve towards and away from one another, at times interweaving, emphasizing the relationship between line and ground. Rather than describing a fixed form, the paintings activate the space around and between their lines. This understanding of space relates to Jaramillo's longstanding interest in Ma, a Japanese concept describing the interval or pause between things. Rather than an absence, ma understands this space between as active and generative, given meaning by the elements that surround it. In the curvilinear paintings, these intervals become integral to the composition: the distance between one line and another, and between the visible line and its imagined continuation beyond the canvas.
In contrast to the paintings' openness and restraint, Jaramillo's linen-fiber works are materially dense and layered. Torn and cut fragments overlap, interrupt, and connect with one another, creating rich, tactile surfaces. Jaramillo first began working with linen fiber in the late 1970s and continued to explore the medium's possibilities over subsequent decades. Built up from water, linen-fiber pulp, and hand-ground earth pigments, these works developed from an investigation into the fundamental materials of painting and how to create visual depth through thin abstract veils. In these collages, Jaramillo returns to works made across different periods of her career, layering fragments to assemble new relationships and allowing distinct moments in her practice to coexist within a single composition.
Seen together, these works complicate a chronological reading of Jaramillo's practice. Ideas and materials recur across decades, evolving and taking on new meaning as past investigations are revisited and reimagined. The exhibition's title, Pause in Time, speaks to this resistance to linearity. A pause is neither an ending nor an absence, but an interval within an ongoing continuum. Across these works, Jaramillo looks both backwards and forwards, returning to longstanding investigations not as fixed points in her history, but as ideas that remain active and open to transformation.
Born in Texas, Jaramillo lived in California, followed by time in Paris, France, between 1965-66, before settling in New York in the late 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, in which she was the only woman artist.
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 many institutional collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among many others.
Jaramillo lives and works in Hampton Bays, New York.
