Gary Hume

Gary Hume (born 1962, Kent) is a British painter whose work is immediately recognisable for its use of high-gloss household paint on aluminium panel. Emerging from Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s, Hume came to early prominence with his door paintings — large-scale, deadpan renderings of hospital swing doors that held figuration and abstraction in deliberate suspension.

His subsequent work expanded into figures, animals, flowers and faces, rendered in flat, interlocking planes of colour that owe as much to Art Nouveau and stained glass as to the painting traditions they nominally inhabit. The surfaces are seductive and resistant in equal measure: the gloss finish reflects the viewer back, while the simplified forms withhold the psychological depth that figurative painting conventionally promises.

Hume has exhibited extensively with White Cube in London and Matthew Marks Gallery in New York. Publications produced in connection with his exhibitions — catalogues, artist books, and printed matter — document a practice in which the image is always already a surface, and the surface is always already a question about what painting can and cannot hold.

  • Package Holiday: New British Art in the Ophiuchus Collection, The Hydra Workshop, Hydra, 1997. Front cover: solid bright blue card with "PACKAGE HOLIDAY" in large black bold type lower left; 15 artist names in three rows of small white text below — Don Brown, Peter Doig, Tracey Emin, Angus Fairhurst, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Paul Noble, Chris Ofili, Richard Patterson, Simon Patterson, Georgina Starr, Sam Taylor-Wood, Nicola Tyson, Gillian Wearing. Landscape format, 21 × 15 cm. Light handling cr Package Holiday, Hydra Workshop, 1997. Interior spread: left, full-bleed colour photograph of Hydra harbour and hillside town — whitewashed cubic buildings descending to the water, blue sky and sea; right, white page with "PACKAGE HOLIDAY" heading in bold blue type, two paragraphs of exhibition text, and black silhouette of three stacked suitcases lower centre.

    PACKAGE HOLIDAY: New British Art in the Ophiuchus Collection. Hydra Workshop, 1997

    PACKAGE HOLIDAY: New British Art in the Ophiuchus Collection. Hydra Workshop, 1997