Gary Hume

Text

"They expect me to tell them, to define it for them: What is art? If I knew the answer, I'd keep it to myself." Pablo Picasso, 1926

Gary Hume's art has a simple, immaculate elegance and a peculiar, damaged beauty. Viewer, space, and light are reflected in his shiny surfaces and polished aluminum, the preferred support for his paintings. Hume uses household gloss paints, often applied in several layers. On the hard materials, they take on the consistency of liquids frozen in motion. Hume himself refers to them as "the thinnest sculptures in the world."1 Always unmixed and strictly separated, the flat planes and lines create hard edges. The colors form stark contrasts of saturated brown and pale green, powerful pink and black, but also finely nuanced shades of deepest olive green, brown, and blue-black. Hume loves these dark shades—almost black but still colorful. His visual idiom is minimalist, his images reduced, always open to multiple readings: Figurative and ornamentally abstract at the same time, simple but also extremely complex and clever, they are both beautiful and disturbing. As a result, it is not easy to say what his pictures are. Each work is new in its own way, but identifiable concordances and coherent developments can be observed. Certain objects display great conceptual rigor, other pieces have an underlying emotional impact. This applies above all to the more figurative works created since 1993. Asked to name his motifs, Hume usually replies, "flora, fauna, and portraiture."
Hume became known at the end of the 1980s for his "Doors" series (fig. 1), works whose form and character resemble the kind of swinging doors with porthole windows and rectangular handles commonly found in public buildings in Britain. Executed in high-gloss paint on hardboard or aluminum, the Doors also imitate the materials of their models. They are disconcerting duplicates of real-world objects and at the same time pieces of pure painting, strict geometrical compositions that exhibit sparing use of color and form. With this duplicate character, they provoke a calculated collision between reality and its equivalent in art, between surface and content, pointing up the difference between representation and what is represented.
,,What is it?
Why have you done it?"
Anne Prenzler
1. In a panel discussion with Michael Craig-Martin on January 24, 2004, at the opening of Hume's exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz,

"What is it? Why have you done it?": Especially in the early days, says Hume in a recent interview, people would often ask him what his pictures were, what he meant by them.2 In his answer, the artist refers the interviewer back to the works themselves: "They are pictures and I don't know what they are. Doing my best, I believe in them, I believe that they have got a truth in them." In other words, the pictures have no message or meaning beyond themselves, This position of Hume's is close to Hard Edge painting and Minimalism. Because of their object quality, their reduced formal vocabulary, and their hermetic logic, his works are often compared to those of Ellsworth Kelly. But unlike Kelly, instead of shaping his supports, Hume trims his figures to fit the support, using hard, sharp edges to create a tension within the picture between figure and ground.
Hume's handling of art history and of existing artistic positions is deliberate and original. Explicit references to other artists are numerous and by no means limited to the styles referred to above, ranging instead from Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg to Henri Matisse. In some cases, Hume offers interpretations of existing masterpieces, as in After Vermeer or After Petrus Christus (both 1995) (figs. 2 and 3). Some of his latest works are reminiscent of Jackson Pollock. They each feature three blobs of paint—thick heavy drops with dried-over surfaces—from which fine dripped lines emerge, tracing the painter's movements in flourishes and wavy lines. Unlike Pollock, who used a canvas lying on the floor to liberate himself from the usual upright perspective, Hume creates lines that run parallel in one direction from top to bottom. Like Pollock, he too lays his supports on the floor, but his drippings are brought under control by their simple arrangement: They are reduced and tanned action paintings. This is a perfect example of how, to a certain extent, Hume's works explain themselves at the technical level. But what are his pictures beyond this? Two main strategies can be observed in his oeuvre, in his works with a more conceptual orientation, like the Doors, on the one hand, and in his nominally figurative pieces that in spite of their elegant coolness possess unexpected emotional qualities, on the other.

2. "Gary Hume," video, 26 min., 2004, part of the series The Eye, © Illuminations. All further quotations by Gary Hume taken from this interview.

Small Disappointment (2003) (fig. 4) is one of Hume's more conceptual works, as simple as it is intelligent and enigmatic. A gaudy pink grid of lines with two vertical and three horizontal struts divides up a large-format, high-gloss black surface into more or less square segments of slightly varying width. In the second square from the top on the left, there is a silver spot approximately three centimeters across, clearly a dried blob of paint with a wrinkled surface. The picture can be read in two ways: As a reduced, abstract representation of a window with several bars through which the viewer looks out into the black night and sees a small moon or star, or as a strictly minimalist composition, whose geometrical order and clarity is thrown off balance by the silver moon blob. This blob reveals itself as an error in the system. The play on the word "point" in the title identifies it without doubt as the cause of this disappointment. The spot is clearly responsible for the unequal distribution of the rectangles, pushing the left-hand grid line a few centimeters to the right. Precise measurements confirm this: On account of the spot, eight of the twelve rectangles are not true squares. The layering of the paint tells us that the pink lines and black segments were applied more or less at the same time, as their edges run up against each other. The silver spot, on the other hand, sits on top of the black surface. As the final element in the process of making the painting, it was thus planned from the outset, a calculated accident.
Small Disappointment belongs to Hume's "Window" series (fig. 5), which is formally related to his "Doors." The same kind of duplication of reality seen in these works also occurs in his Snowman sculptures. Smooth spheres, piled two or three high, identical in form, and sometimes even color, to that of simple snowmen, they are a smart and subversive statement on the Utopia of the ideal sculpture. Bock of a Snowman (2002) (fig. 6), for example, consists of two smooth, white, painted spheres with no real front or back (and no face). It is the absolutely perfect sculpture, as Hume says: Viewable from all sides, immaculate from every angle.

in this way, Hume questions existing attitudes to the work ot art, at times sabotaging them. For example, ever since he completed the "Doors" series in 1993, any subsequent Hume paintings featuring a door can be seen as ironic self-quotations. The Couple (2004) (fig. 7) features four door-like panels in a row, the inner pair in bare aluminum, the outer in glossy pink and violet. At their upper edge, they all have a white circle the shape of a porthole window. The two pairs of panels are linked by a horizontal white line in the lower third. With great economy of means, the doors are given personal qualities, becoming naive-looking faces. This is also true of Welcome (2002) (fig. 8), where a curved line—a smiling mouth— graces the lower section of a pink double door. In a simple way, the initial minimalist rigor of the Doors is destroyed and their claim to original, object-like status successfully undermined.
Some of Hume's recent works, such as Wheel or Fashion (both 2004) (figs. 9 and 10), return to the conceptual double character of the Doors. Wheel consists of a turquoise square on a circular aluminum support. A simple wheel with the merest suggestion of an axle, it can also be read as a mathematical puzzle, as the point of departure for squaring the circle. In Fashion, broad, black, diagonal stripes cut uniformly across the picture, between them the dull shine of the bare aluminum panel. Besides the obvious reference to textile design, the picture's title can also be read as a verb and the work as a result of this activity. Hume's more reduced, conceptual works also include his series of Exclamation Point paintings (2004): Black on black, black on dark gray, black on aluminum, Dadaist double images full of humor. As representations of a symbol, what they say always ends up referring back to themselves—they are at once sign, signified, and signifier.

Alongside these conceptual works, Hume has been working intensively since 1993 on figurative paintings of flowers, animals, and people. These works, too, are Janus-like. In Lion (2004) (fig. 11), for example, Hume uses an aesthetic strategy of transformation reminiscent of the Surrealist inventions of Max Ernst (fig. 12). The flowing lion's mane is based on smoke formations in the air. At the same time, the figure is a dynamic, ornamental structure with an abstract quality. As can be seen in this case, Hume's motifs and their transformations sometimes make a decidedly poetic impression. They are observations by an attentive, intelligent viewer—always fresh, original, and questioning—transposed into the language of art.
Hume's recent work Brown Roses (2004) (fig. 13) shows a deep-brown, glossy floral form with irregular edges against a pale green background. The sharp-edged outlines recall flowers and leaves, and in the interior of the brown field, very similar organic structures appear in minimal relief beneath the opaque gloss paint. The eponymous roses are submerged under a shiny layer of paint, sealed in and suffocated. Hume likes to refer to himself as a "beauty terrorist." In contrast to Andy Warhol's flowers, for example, these blooms are not glamorous icons; for all their beauty, they are transient and diffusely disturbing. The flowers in Peonies (2004) (fig. 14) are also partially covered with olive-brown paint, and in Grey Leaves (2004) (fig. 15), the skin-colored ground wins the struggle, with the yellow rose no more than a memory: As a hidden element, it remains visible beneath the fine layer of gloss paint. Hume's flower pictures are wild, destructive extrapolations of Blossfeldt's explorations into archetypes of art in nature's miraculous garden (fig. 16).3 The immaculate glossy surfaces generate an impermeable solidity that is at odds with the abundance of floral forms.
3. Karl Blossfeldt: Urformen der Kunst [Art Forms in Nature], Berlin, 1928. Karl Blossfeldt: Wundergarten der Natur [Nature's Magic Garden], Berlin, 1932. Blossfeldt's work set standards for the photography of New Objectivity

The technique of overpaying is also used by Hume in his portraits. He has already made several portraits of Nicola, an artist friend. In Nicola with Top Hat (2004) (fig. 17), the model's features are almost completely masked by a brown that is deep and dark, almost black. The fullness of her hair means her face is only partially visible, standing out as a thin silhouette against the hair and the bright orange ground. The outline of the head and the strands of hair, as well as the face, are marked by line-like gaps, through which the black undercoat can be seen. Hume often works with a silicon-like paste to achieve these gaps. Or he scratches them into the paint before it dries. The face appears obliterated, obscured almost beyond recognition; the black highlighting of the features can barely make itself felt against the dark brown; the eyes are surrounded by strange rings, like melancholy patches; overall, the portrait appears hermetic and distant. Besides this latent emotional quality, the painting's flat composition also questions the difference between figure and ground, object and abstract form. The top hat referred to in the title is no more than a broad black band at the top edge of the picture.
In Pink Nicola (2004) (fig. 18), the face is reduced to a thin pink shape in the center of the aluminum panel. Only someone already familiar with Nicola with Top Hat (2004) or Green Nicola (2003) (fig. 19) can immediately identify the reduced form as a partial negative of the face amid the full head of hair. Around the eye, a large blotch is omitted. This portrait is a relic, the remains of a face, but at the same time, it is a dynamic, abstract shape with clear, hard edges that appears primarily to follow the compositional logic of negative and positive fields. It is an abstraction pushed to the limits, as well as a human being reduced to the point of being unrecognizable.
Most of Hume's people, animals, and plants are highly imperfect entities. A flaw—an overpainting or a gap, a spot or a line—disturbs the beauty and awakens a feeling of vulnerability or even pity, The same applies to his portraits of celebrities. Hume's Michael (2001) (fig. 20) is a ghostly, chalk-white face on a circular support with spidery, enigmatic lines on its cheeks. The nose, a white patch on a white ground, is near invisible except for the dark nostrils. This Michael is an unsettling mutation of the already grotesque real-life Michael Jackson.

Hermaphrodite Polar Bear (2003) shows a gigantic polar bear in pale pastel yellow standing on its tour brown paws. Its sex organs are male and female. The slightly obscene depiction is trivialized by bright friendly ice-cream colors—a child's toy outsized and degenerate. Behind this piece lies a true story: Entire populations ot polar bears in Norway are mutating into infertile hermaphrodites on account of environmental pollution. For Hume, however, such narrative content is always of secondary importance. In the picture, the malformation forms the basis for a grotesque figure, both tragic and comic.
Hume's latest series of sculptures also deals with the bear motif. Rounded sections of varying sizes with deep crevices form a symmetrical, bulging body. On the one hand, these sculptures are a poetic development of the Hume's snowmen, and on the other, a sculptural equivalent of the works Polar Bear and Bear (both 1994) (figs. 21 and 22). The animals' ears, paws, and body curves appear to have been slowly and uniformly inflated. The missing features give them an uncanny, hermetic anonymity.
"I have not said everything, but I have painted everything," said Picasso in 1968. The question of what Gary Hume's works are is indeed answered by the works themselves. He is clearly interested in misplacement and deformity, he seems always to be in search of the displaced or overpainted detail, the spot that steps out of line, jeopardizing immaculate beauty or carefully constructed order. With equal rigor, he explores the Utopia of the perfect artwork and carries out acts of terrorist sabotage on beauty, and occasionally on his own art. He is a Minimalist and a Surrealist, a Pop Artist and a Conceptualist. Finally, he is above all a painter and a sculptor, an artist who calls himself into question and reinvents himself with every new work. And this means that for him, no one of his works is any better than any other, each one is itself: "Each painting is its own thing." As Hume sees it, art cannot be pinned down in dogmatic terms: "Art is not about absolute concrete affirmations. Art has questions and doubts and ups and downs of preference."

Anne Prenzler, curator.

First published in Prenzler, Anne and Michael Wilson. Gary Hume. Carnival, Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, Hannover 2004

More on Gary Hume

	Related Texts
CV
Bibliography
Behind the Face of the Door by Adrian Searle
Gary Hume in conversation with David Barrett

	Related Links
http://www.illuminationsmed... Eye Series of films by Illuminations
http://www.tate.org.uk/serv... Tate Online
http://www.matthewmarks.com... Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
http://www.tate.org.uk/brit... Tate Online
http://www.imma.ie/en/page_... Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

Back to Gary Hume

• Terms & Conditions
• |
• Copyright Information
• |
• Privacy Policy
• |
• Sitemap