Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is pleased to present Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence, the first major retrospective and largest monographic exhibition to date of the work of Virginia Jaramillo. Tracing the artist’s practice from the mid-1960s through the present, Principle of Equivalence features more than 40 abstract paintings and handmade paper works that reveal her longstanding preoccupation with the relationships between the earthly and metaphysical realms.

Taking shape in New York and Los Angeles during the 1960s and 1970s—amid mass political movements and debates around representation and the relevance of painting—Jaramillo’s work has long engaged with abstraction’s formal and social potentials. Alongside her iconic Curvilinear series, the exhibition features works made during her decades-long collaboration with the Dieu Donné Papermill in New York, as well as recent paintings in which Jaramillo redoubles her interests in quantum physics, geography, and the passage of time. Together, these works reach for the fundamentals of comprehension: how our experience of the physical forms the basis of ideas, and how abstraction can offer alternate ways of understanding our world.

Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence was originally organized by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, and curated by Erin Dziedzic, Director of Curatorial Affairs. The MCA’s presentation is organized by René Morales, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, and Iris Colburn, Curatorial Associate. It runs from May 4, 2024, through January 5, 2025, in the Bergman Family Gallery.