CHICAGO, IL.- The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is presenting Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence, running through January 5, 2025 in the Bergman Family Gallery.

Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence is the first major retrospective and largest monographic exhibition to date of the work of Virginia Jaramillo (b. 1939, El Paso, TX; lives in Hampton Bays, NY). Tracing the artist’s practice from the mid-1960s through the present, Principle of Equivalence features over forty 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 of 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.