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2/6/2013

Gary Hume / Patrick Caulfield

Tate Britain, London

Gary Hume

curated by Katharine Stout, Curator Contemporary Art at Tate Britain

Gary Hume (born 1962) is a leading figure among the young artists who studied at London’s Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s. From 5 June this year, Tate Britain will present an exhibition highlighting Hume’s innovative use of colour, line and surface over the last twenty years. Featuring both iconic and less familiar paintings and sculpture, the show will also include new work and international loans that have not been seen in the UK before.

The exhibition will run parallel to a survey of celebrated painter Patrick Caulfield (1936–2005), offering visitors the chance to see alongside each other two complementary British painters from different generations.

Hume first received critical acclaim in the early 1990s with his large-scale paintings based on hospital doors boldly rendered in high gloss paint. These were first exhibited in the 1988 Freeze exhibition organised by Hume’s fellow student Damien Hirst, which introduced the internationally celebrated group of ‘Young British Artists’.

This early focus evolved over subsequent decades to encompass a range of subjects: figures such as mothers and babies, friends and celebrities, as well as images drawn from nature or childhood including flowers, birds and snowmen. Through this varied set of motifs, Hume explores the full spectrum of emotional response from wonder and joy to melancholy and loss. Conventional ideas of beauty are frequently countered by a darker, more questioning sense of the world.

The exhibition will bring together around twenty-five striking works in which recognisable forms are sometimes fragmented to near abstraction. The original source image may be left far behind as shapes emerge in the paintings through vibrant areas of colour, whilst lines are articulated as thin ridges of paint that disrupt the surface and the eye. Highlights include iconic early works such as Tony Blackburn 1993, and Blackbird 1998 as well as major recent paintings such as Red Barn Door 2008, recently acquired by Tate with assistance from the Art Fund, and new work made especially for the exhibition.

Gary Hume was born in Kent in 1962 and now lives and works in London and upstate New York, USA. He studied at Liverpool Polytechnic and later Goldsmiths and within a year of his graduation in 1988 his work was being exhibited internationally. Since then it has been seen in solo and important group exhibitions around the world including The Bird has a Yellow Beak, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2004; Door Paintings, Modern Art Oxford, 2008; Gary Hume: Flashback, Leeds Art Gallery, 2012 and Beauty, Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev. Gary Hume was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1996, represented Great Britain in The Venice Biennale in 1999 and in 2001was elected a Royal Academician.

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Patrick Caulfield

From June 2013, Tate Britain will present a survey exhibition of the celebrated British painter, Patrick Caulfield. From the 1960s, Caulfield (1936 – 2005) has been known for his iconic and vibrant paintings of modern life that reinvigorated such traditional artistic genres as still life. Celebrating the artist’s mastery of colour, graphic elegance and wit, this exhibition will offer the chance to reassess his influences and the legacy of his approach to painting.

Patrick Caulfield will run in parallel to an exhibition on contemporary artist, Gary Hume (b. 1962), offering visitors the chance to see alongside each other two complementary British painters from different generations.

Patrick Caulfield came to prominence in the mid-1960s after studying at the Royal College of Art where fellow students included David Hockney. In the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s defining 1964 exhibition The New Generation he became associated with pop art. However, he always resisted this label, preferring to see himself as a ‘formal artist’ and an inheritor of painting traditions from Modern masters such as Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger who influenced his composition and choice of subject matter.

This exhibition will trace the development of Patrick Caulfield’s distinctive style. Traditional genres such as still life are radically re-imagined to produce images of startling originality. Early on in his career Caulfield rejected gestural brushstrokes for the more anonymous techniques of sign-writers. Works such as Still Life with Dagger 1963 are characterised by flat areas of colour defined by simple outlines.

In the 1970s Caulfield began combining different styles of representation, such as trompe-l’oeil, to create highly complex paintings that play with definitions of reality and artifice. For example After Lunch 1975 (Tate) features a photorealist image of the Château de Chillon, hanging in a restaurant interior that is depicted in simple black outlines against a flat, two-toned background. This shift in practice coincided with a subtle change in subject matter to topics that directly engaged with the contemporary social landscape and the representation of modern life, and remained his focus for the rest of his career.

Over thirty significant works from public and private collections will be brought together to represent the key moments of Caulfield’s career, including well-known popular paintings such as Pottery 1969 and Interior with a Picture 1985-6. These will be shown alongside lesser known works such as Bend in the Road 1967 and Tandoori Restaurant 1971. The exhibition will also include later paintings such as Bishops 2004 and the artist’s final work Braque Curtain 2005.

Patrick Caulfield was born in West London and studied at Chelsea School of Art, followed by the Royal College of Art. Major exhibitions during his lifetime included retrospectives at Walker Art Gallery Liverpool and Tate, both 1981; Serpentine Gallery, 1992-3 and Hayward Gallery, 1999. In 1993 he was elected a Royal Academician.

The exhibition is curated by Clarrie Wallis, Curator (Modern and Contemporary British Art) at Tate Britain. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication on Caulfield’s work.

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Image: Selected Grapes
British Council Collection
© The estate of Patrick Caulfield. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2013

Press contact:
Kate Moores / Alexandra Jacobs, Tate Press Office
Call +44(0)20 7887 4906/4942 Email pressoffice@tate.org.uk

Press view: 3 June 2013

Tate Britain
Millbank, London
Open daily 10.00 - 18.00
See two exhibitions with one ticket: Patrick Caulfield and Gary Hume for £13.10 (£11.30 concessions) or £14.50 (£12.50 concessions) with Gift Aid donation. For public information number please print +44(0)20 7887 8888

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