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| Gertsev Gallery. Collection |
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Gary Hume
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In 1988, Gary Hume graduated from the Goldsmiths College and took part in the Freeze II Exhibition, organized in London by Damien Hirst. Alongside other Hirst projects that exhibition marked an important generation change in British art and served as a launching pad for a group of rebels, who later were referred to as Young British Artists (YBA). Nearly all of them were trained at the Goldsmiths College in innovative programs developed by two truly outstanding artists, Michael Craig-Martin and John Thompson. A solid conceptual base underpinned the works of Young British Artists, who shared provocative views and rejected all sorts of dogmas. As time passed the budding artists managed to find support among major art dealers, such as Jay Joplin and Karsten Schubert, as well as the collector and promoter Charles Saatchi. A few years later their works could be found in galleries the world over. It won't be an exaggeration to say that Gary Hume was and remains, perhaps, the most successful of the Young British Artists. Although they started as a group and were identified as daring and cheerful urbanites, Hume always remained somewhat aloof. To begin with, he was an artist who made things to look at and live with.
At the Freeze II exhibition Gary Hume displayed a series of life-size hospital doors painted in ordinary oil. In the late 1980s Hume became known precisely for his "door paintings," but in the beginning of the following decade he forgot all about doors and turned his attention to other images that inspired him at that time. He drew on photographs or magazine illustrations, which he transferred to an anodized aluminium base with the help of a projector fixed on the ceiling and then worked them with enamel. Hume's painting became more expressive, and his iconography began to include faces, hands, flowers and teddy bears outlined in an over-simplified manner in disregard of perspective or shape. His style grew complicated with cross-sections, superpositions, negatives and fanciful compositions made of outlines of birds and angels. Those images included everything, starting from cutouts of pop idols Kate Moss and Patsy Kensit and ending with flowers and lumps of biomorphic mass.
Gary Hume's pictures are complex and sincere. His choice of colour and subject, which may seem mockingly tasteless or even sarcastic, is in fact meant to be beautiful and close to man. "Beauty" and "Man" are the two words often used by Hume, when he speaks about his art.
Gary Hume broadly exhibited in Great Britain and abroad, especially at London's White Cube and New York's Matthew Marks Inc. galleries. In 1996, he represented Great Britain at the Sao Paulo biennial and was nominated for the Turner Prize. In 1999, he attended the XLVIII Venice Biennial. Hume's solo shows were staged at the Bonnefantenmuseum of Maastricht, Institute of Contemporary Art in London, “la Caixa” Fund of Barcelona and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Our gallery is currently showing two series of Gary Hume's screenprints, Portraits (1998) and Spring Angels (2000).
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