Gary Hume
dal 3/9/2007 al 5/10/2007
Segnalato da
3/9/2007
Gary Hume
White Cube, London
American Tan
American Tan
American Tan shows a contemporary master at the height of his form,
with all the seductive colours and shapes for which Hume is renowned,
and yet this new body of work is also a remarkable departure for the
artist. Dividing his time between studios in London and upstate New
York, the series has a unifying theme that developed during his time in
America. In an interview with Ulrich Loock, Hume comments that this
group of paintings and sculptures represents 'responses to America and
how we're all being tanned by American policy and culture, the war and
simple, complicated stuff like that. It started off with cheerleaders.
The form of them is absolutely fantastic. They're athletic. They're
super-gymnasts . . .' From this image of the cheerleader, Hume has
created a powerful take on contemporary American culture.
The fluffy dynamism of cheerleading - the speed, power and polish of
young women performing for a crowd - contrasts sharply with the rigid
shapes of the paintings, forms abstracted from the limbs, hips and
shoulders and the negative space they create, to form broad expanses of
slick, glossy colour. Sometimes the imagery is palpable and clear, with
bodily forms readily visible, while in others the shapes are more
ambiguous and haunting. Although the palette, with its mix of pastels
and gentle flesh tones, conveys a kind of innocence, the sense of
dislocation and rupture in many of the paintings strikes a note of
disquiet. Dissecting these figures to find both hints of beauty and
anxiety in the American dream, Hume finds ambivalence in this most
iconic of American art forms: simultaneous desire and repulsion, overt
sexuality colliding with playful innocence, power and pride wrapped up
in exuberant kitsch.
Seven sculptures extend Hume's theme. To make these large-scale bronze
works, Hume began with mannequin parts, those idealised shapes designed
to represent human limbs in their most nonspecific and perfected form.
Hume fused the parts into sets of pairs and enlarged them to create
giant bronze limbs that stretch and bend into space like surreal,
biomorphic excrescences. Some of the limbs are topped with enormous,
aluminum pompons, while others are left truncated. With forms and
colours balanced delicately between the decorative and the grotesque,
the sculptures hint at the excess and flamboyance of American culture.
Gary Hume has exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions,
including Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, Kunsthaus Bregenz, the Irish
Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and the Venice Biennale, where he
represented Britain in 1999. Angels, Flowers and Icons, a retrospective
exhibition of his prints, is at the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery,
Hastings, until 23 September.
A fully illustrated catalogue, with an essay by distinguished historian
of American painting David Anfam, and an interview with the artist by
Ulrich Loock, Deputy Director of Museu Serralves in Porto, Portugal,
will accompany the exhibition.
White Cube
48 Hoxton Square - London
Free admission