Gary Hume and Antipodes
dal 25/9/2002 al 2/11/2002
Segnalato da
25/9/2002
Gary Hume and Antipodes
White Cube, London
A new series of paintings by Gary Hume and Louise Neri, curator, will present a yearlong series of one-off projects and events with international artists entitled Antipodes.
Gary Hume
New Paintings
27.09.02 - 26.10.02
Opening Thursday 26th September 6-8pm
White Cube is pleased to present a new series of paintings by Gary Hume, who is best known for
his paintings using gloss paint on aluminium panels to present a visual vocabulary distinguished by
a bright palette, reduced singular imagery and flat areas of colour. Hume has continually returned to
particular subjects, such as the nude, the portrait, the garden and the pictorial idiom of childhood
with his images of polar bears, snowmen, rabbits, owls and large close-up faces. The feelings they
evoke are often dreamlike; childhood recollected. The emotional vantage point being perhaps that of
a child viewing trees from below or looking at a bird's nest through a lattice of twigs and branches,
seeing the pink of a rabbit's eye or a faceless adult.
Whilst Hume's paintings have always appeared to be about their surfaces - shiny and reflective in
gloss paint - these new works seem more inward and secretive, generating a sense that things are
being withheld. In several works the imagery appears latent, as if it were heat-sealed and held back
through a narrow tonal range of blues, greys and whites. Many of the new paintings are infused with
a melancholic and heavy beauty. Together the paintings create an atmosphere of muted celebration
with their intricate and ornate swathes, bouquets and garlands of flowers. In several paintings a
fragment or detail appears to be pulled out in relief, one peony head out of many, a schematised
nose on a muted pink face, the horizontal green line of the hat, a strand of highlighted hair. These
details, made more visible, only serve to push the rest of the image back, making it latent and
generating a feeling of loss.
Hume has exhibited extensively internationally including representing Britain at the 1999 Venice
Biennale and solo shows at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and the
Whitechapel Gallery, London.
An illustrated catalogue, with an essay by Angus Cook will be published to accompany the
exhibition.
For further information please contact Susannah Hyman or Honey Luard on 020 7930 5373.
Open Tuesday to Saturday 10am - 6pm.
Image: a work by Gary Hume
_____________
Antipodes
David Hammons
27.09.02 - 02.11.02
Opening Thursday 26th September 6-8pm
Inside the White Cube is the new project space opening September 26 2002 at White Cube in
Hoxton Square, London. Each year an international guest curator will be invited to develop and
present the exhibition programme for this space, in collaboration with White Cube. For 2002-2003
Louise Neri will present a yearlong series of one-off projects and events with international artists entitled Antipodes.
Louise Neri’s story begins with an intriguing red map, purportedly made by Jesuits some centuries
ago. The map, scattered inexplicably with characters, depicts a world as yet only partly discovered.
A vast landmass covers the southern pole and extends northward, dwarfing the known continents
and their archipelagos. This nameless zone is the uncharted Antipodes. The ancient term was used
by the early cartographers to describe the vague and unexplored regions of an opposite hemisphere.
It fuelled centuries of rabid yet fertile cultural superstition about an imagined place where men
walked around upside-down, completely contrary to nature.
Living in a time where such literal notions have been dispelled by our empirical knowledge of the
world, ‘antipodes’ might then be a geographical metaphor for the extraterritorial condition of the
artist, who comes today and stays tomorrow, who is fixed within a particular spatial group. The
position within this group is determined, essentially, by the fact that having not ‘belonged’ to it from
the outset, s/he is able to import foreign qualities into it, provoking positive confrontation with the
previously unthought and unseen.
The new programme, then, is introduced with a picture rather than a theory, where the speculated
terrain has been cropped from the original map and upended, so that the imagined artistic
hemisphere now dominates the shrinking global picture. With this picture as a mental compass, a
guest curator in a host institution will begin to map an elsewhere with artists inside the white cube.
Louise Neri is a curator and writer who between 1990-99 was based in New York as U.S. Editor of
Parkett, the internationally renowned art journal. As well as writing essays and editing books on
contemporary artists in a cultural context, she has co-curated large-scale survey exhibitions
including the Whitney Biennial in 1997 and the São Paulo Biennale in 1998, and consulted for the
Sydney Biennale in 2000.
Inside the White Cube will be open from Tuesday through Saturday, 10am – 6pm, with changing
exhibitions opening on the first Tuesday of every month. Inside the White Cube can also be followed
as a subsite on the White Cube website: www.whitecube.com
October David Hammons
November Katharina Grosse
December Daido Moriyama
White Cube, 48 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB