ART CITIES:Los Angeles -Gary Hume
After graduating from Goldsmiths College and exhibiting in 1988’s “Freeze”, organised by Damien Hirst, Gary Hume gained early recognition for a group of paintings based on hospital doors. He then began broadening his subject matter, at first by introducing nudes, portraiture and motifs drawn from nature, then by referencing popular culture, in particular, images of celebrity figures. Recently, Hume has explored the imagery of rural America with paintings of barn doors and flowers.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive
Gary Hume is known for his bright, flatly colored, figurative and abstract paintings on aluminum panels paintings in high gloss, industrial paint. He emerged in the early 1990s as part of the Young British Artists movement. In his solo exhibition Gary Hume presents eight recent paintings in enamel on aluminum or paper at both spaces of Matthew Marks Gallery in Los Angeles. Hume’s new paintings include several large-scale depictions of the sea. Some have life jackets floating across them, while others are left resolutely empty, their wide horizontal format and undulating monochrome surface recalling a Monet “Water Lily” updated for the 21st Century. For his paintings the artist says “The edge is the only thing that matters, I used to think of the areas of color as tectonic plates meeting, so in the paintings it’s like there are these molten plates that would hit each other and dry. I wanted one of those plates to be higher than the other, and I wanted the hit to be more abrupt”. The high-gloss finish in Hume’s paintings, a feature of the household enamel he has used since the late 1980s, allows each work to be perceived as both object and image, he once described his paintings as “the thinnest sculptures in the world”. Several works in the exhibition were inspired by memories from Hume’s childhood, including evocations of his mother’s garden, as in the paintings “Sweet Pea” (2016) and “Three Leaves” (2016–17). They are abstractions from nature and, like much of Hume’s work, are informed by the artist’s highly intuitive approach to color.
Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1062 North Orange Grove, Los Angeles and 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, Duration: 26/1-30/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.matthewmarks.com
