One Cat hails from a body of work artist Jacqueline Humphries began around 2015 in which she explores the relationship between visual culture in the digital sphere and the central problems of analog abstract painting. Earlier in her career, Humphries engaged with the grid and drips as characteristic elements of this tradition in works like Hit or Miss and Black Dog, also in the Albright-Knox’s collection. However, more recently she explained that “I really wanted to engage this aspect of our life with screens—how much time we spend looking at these little teeny things on our phones when there’s this big world out there.” In this work, Humphries used a laser-cut stencil based on the cat face emoji to recreate this “one cat” thousands of times in a grid that, from afar, evokes the screen of a digital monitor made of individual LEDs (light-emitting diodes). Upon closer inspection, however, the thick dollops of black paint that constitute the cat heads as well as the “pixelated” omega symbol in the upper-left of the composition give material presence to the virtual images that circulate through texting and social media platforms.