Gary Hume

Gary Hume (b. 1962) is renowned for paintings distinguished by a bright palette, reduced imagery, and flat areas of seductive color. While Hume's paintings have always emphasized their luscious surfaces and simplified forms, many are infused with a melancholic beauty. Hume first received critical acclaim with a body of work known as the "Door" paintings. These minimal and abstract works, with their high-gloss paint and insistent reflective surfaces, developed in the early 1990s into a broader set of motifs, such as the nude, the portrait, the garden, as well as a pictorial idiom drawn from childhood, with images of polar bears, snowmen, rabbits, owls and close-up faces. His subject matter broadened yet more through the mid 1990s to incorporate images from popular culture, making portraits of celebrity figures such as Kate Moss, British radio DJ Tony Blackburn, and actress Patsy Kensit. For the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1999), he produced the "Water Paintings," large-scale works of multiple, overlapping line drawings of nudes punctuated by flat areas of color. "Cave Paintings," the title of his most recent show at White Cube, featured seven marble tableaux composed of a variety of different stones set against each other in collaged sections that appear like tectonic plates. These are held together by a lead tracery that provides the edge to the expanses of color, traced by the natural faults and veins inherent in the stone itself. These monolithic compositions are hand-carved and richly decadent, combining visual motifs from the natural world with imagery suggestive of human birth and fundamental emotions. Gary Hume was born in Kent in 1962 and lives and works in London and upstate New York. Solo shows include Sao Paulo Bienal (1996), Venice Biennale (1999) Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1999), the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (1999), Fundacao La Caixa, Barcelona (2000), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2003), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2004) and the Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2004). Group shows include Tate Britain, London (2004), Louisiana Museum, Denmark (2004), Kunsthalle Basel (2002), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2001).