ART CITIES:London-Gary Hume
Gary Hume is known for figurative and abstract paintings on aluminum panels, which often feature startling color combinations made with paints purchased premixed from a hardware store. His work is strongly identified with the Young British Artists artists who came to prominence in the early ‘90s.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Arhive
Gary Hume’s solo exhibition “MUM” at Sprüth Magers Galleru, is his first solo exhibition in the UK since his retrospective at Tate Britain in 2013, and is also the first time that his paintings on paper are exhibited publicly.Gary Hume’s new body of works on paper mark a critical shift in his practice. Emerging from preparatory sketches, they revealed themselves as a unique and compelling body of work that has led the artist to develop an entirely new painting method. The use of domestic gloss paint is indicative of Hume’s practice, yet its effect on the paper ground enables a distinctive interplay between light, depth, and texture that stands in stark contrast to his characteristic aluminium paintings. The formal properties of the new material prevent the artist from being able to scrape back the paint and rework an image as he can with aluminium. Without room for revision, the paintings on paper are much more akin to the medium of drawing, and develop only through the artist’s clear perception of the finished image. They are set in very thin aluminium tray frames, and their sculptural surface is unmediated by glass. Gary Hume’s new paintings on paper act as a meditation on memory. The distortion of their surface questions the consistency of recollection, whilst the truncated forms mimic the ability of the mind’s eye to abstract physical and visceral experience into a collection of stilled and disembodied images. In “Mum twisting” (2015), the skirt of her cheesecloth dress appears to be moving as she twists her body. The image mimics a child’s hip-height vantage point when observing adults and creates an unusual family portrait. Also on view are a number of aluminium paintings that focus on the artist’s contemporary observations. The large-scale portrait “Mum” (2017) employs a technique of thicker paint lines to denote figuration rather than the thin ridges of paint that he often uses on aluminium. This allows her features to effectively dissolve within the painting, and her image to appear elusive.
Info: Sprüth Magers Gallery, 7A Grafton Street, London, Duration: 30/9-23/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.spruethmagers.com
