Virginia Jaramillo has explored various approaches to abstraction throughout her career, from her studies at Otis Art Institute to her critical early years in Los Angeles and Paris, and New York since the early 1960s. The following is a selection of key works that highlight important themes and transitional moments in her oeuvre.
Early Works, 1959 – 1961
Pasadena Structure Study is an early work where Jaramillo used melted crayons for her earthen-hued, cubist-like paintings, depicting massive manufacturing plants near her home in Los Angeles with steel beams and lights. The geometric composition reveals her fascination with structure and modern abstraction. During this period, she streamlined her name to the gender-ambiguous “V. Jaramillo,” allowing for unbiased critique of her paintings, a signature she would use on and off throughout her career.
Black Paintings, 1963 – 1965
The Black Paintings are a defining body of work inspired by the dry, cracked earth of southern California. Jaramillo used house paints and a dry gesso emulsion to offset smooth black areas that transitioned abruptly to thick, encrusted surfaces mimicking tensions where soil changes or where water meets earth. They also incorporate early elements of abstraction and design aesthetics where arched shapes and lines make balanced compositions that continued throughout her career.
Paris Paintings, 1965
Jaramillo and her family relocate to Paris in 1965 for their first visit to Europe, a time Jaramillo called “cleansing.” They spent time with artists Alberto Giacometti and Joan Mitchell, and later vowed to support each other’s artistic pursuits when they returned to the U.S. She created four small works called the Paris Paintings with thick impasto in blacks and browns reminiscent of the Black Paintings, while introducing forms in bright earthy orange and mauve tones that emerge from the darker surfaces.
Untitled, 1965
After returning from Paris, Jaramillo and her family settled in New York City. Key to this time were artists pushing the boundaries of physical, conceptual, creative, and political space through abstraction. Jaramillo began early explorations of what would become her groundbreaking Curvilinear series with works like Untitled (1965) just as the dominant abstract expressionism movement was fracturing, opening space for other visual languages like color field, hard edge, lyrical, minimalism, op art, and post-painterly abstraction.
Curvilinears, 1966 – 1973
Jaramillo’s Curvilinear paintings are large, flat, opaque surfaces of layered colors — tones of yellow, orange, and green — with dynamic, razor-thin lines that spring across the surface. These lines arc and undulate in opposing shades, creating a blurred tension and fast, vibrating energy. The Curvilinear works present a focused geometric abstract language that aligns closely with that of many of her contemporaries, such as Kenneth Noland. Jaramillo wanted the lines in the Curvilinears to appear as if someone had thrown a piece of thread onto the canvas. She was compelled to make a small gesture seem immense. The Curvilinear paintings were Jaramillo’s first major series in New York and represent a defining period of aesthetic resolve.
Point Omega, 1973 – 2018
In Jaramillo’s painting Point Omega, two crisp silver lines stretch like refracting rays across a grid of six monochromatic canvases. Earthy crimson, purple, and muddy brown, the painting blushes with a suede-like texture; in a certain light, traces of Jaramillo’s brush sway across the surface. Inspired by speculations of futurity, Jaramillo titled the work after the cosmological theory that all matter in the universe will eventually spiral together. In keeping with the theory, Point Omega‘s two lines are not parallel: they will inevitably meet (but not end) somewhere far off the picture plane. Their fate is signaled by the work’s invitation for the viewer to follow the lines from left to right in a sweeping upward motion, or from past to future. She began this work in 1973, and it remained unresolved until after more than thirty years of making handmade paper works; she began painting again. For her, it was necessary to resolve this earlier work before she could continue painting. —Excerpt from Iris Colburn’s essay “Painting on the Edge of Midnight” in Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence (Kemper Museum, 2023).
1972 – 1975 and the Stained Paintings, 1975 – 1979
During the 1970s, Jaramillo developed two more bodies of work, each relating to palettes and textures associated with the earth and in dialogue with her Black Paintings and the Paris Paintings. The first was a group of paintings that explore the range of possibilities of paint and pictorial form, introducing expanded geometric lines, an anchoring square motif, and a loosening of the Curvilinears‘ unvarying colored surfaces and pristine lines (1972 – 75). The second was the Stained Paintings, a series characterized by aqueous surfaces of thin, multilayered veils of paint (1975 – 79).
Handmade Paper Works, 1979 – 2016
The alchemical, archaeological, and ethereal resonance of Earth have been the unwavering protagonist throughout Jaramillo’sartistic career. In 1979 she responded to an advertisement for a papermaking class sponsored by The New School at Dieu Donné Papermill’s flagship location in SoHo. She was motivated by her desire to step away from painting and expand her practice following the Stained Paintings of the late 1970s. Inspired and challenged at Dieu Donné, she shifted to hand papermaking and for the next thirty years amassed a body of work that deepened her aesthetic investigations.
Jason’s Door, 2016
Jason’s Door is one of Jaramillo’s later handmade paper works made just prior to stepping back into painting after more than thirty years. This large-scale work demonstrates some of her most exceptional developments in the handmade paper medium, such as “double dipping” to create thickness and instances where colors seep through or “metal drying” to simulate the look of a metal surface. In this work, she also folded the paper, creating a network of lines and geometric triangular shapes that reference earlier investigations in watermarking and preface the linear compositions of future paintings.
Foundations, 2018
In Foundations, Jaramillo uses diverse brushstroke techniques to build rich, varied textural surfaces which distinguish fractured and fragmented forms. In the 1980s handmade paper works by the same title, Jaramillo drew from her ongoing investigations into ancient civilizations—namely, their architecture and belief systems—to produce large handmade paper works from linen fibers and hand ground earth pigments bearing complex geometric compositions. For this next iteration, Jaramillo focused on the intricacies of traces of ancient structures: an in-depth study into the physical and spiritual life of cultures and referencing contemporary sites of ancient ruin, primarily in, but not limited to, the Middle East and Mexico. Underlying each work is a keen sense of geometry; unconventional forms made from dynamic angles—all drafted by hand with mathematical precision—activate the canvas and spatially orient the viewer. The calculated compositions, in which bold diagonals disrupt sloping arcs and parallel edges, contribute to a perceived tension in the picture plane: a powerful display of both movement and stasis. —Excerpt from “VJ, Angel Queen,” in Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence (Kemper Museum, 2023).
Recent Works: Song of Amergin, 2021
Mythology has played a large role in Jaramillo’s work that continues today. She forms her own mythic translations, converting written and oral histories into something more visual and opaque. Song of Amergin is a large work that strives for such a translation. Comprising three main sections, the canvas has a center of bluish teal, built up with thick, heavy passages of acrylic. The impression it gives is of a rolling sea—a fitting image since Amergin is a foundational figure in Milesian mythology, who calms a tempest conjured by his enemies just as his fleet is about to reach shore. In Jaramillo’s envisioning, a field of deep black flanks each side of this roiling sea. Traversing from edge to edge are two carefully painted lines—one in green that arcs from low to high, and one in puink that dives from high to low. —Excerpt from “VJ, Angel Queen,” in Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence (Kemper Museum, 2023).