THIS WAY / THAT WAY
Paintings from the 90s
13 September - 26 October 2024
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In 1999 Gary Hume was selected by the British Council to represent Britain at the 48th Venice Biennale. Twenty-five years on, and to mark this occasion, Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert are presenting some of his most important early works dating from 1993 through to 1999.The year 1993 marked a radical shift in Hume's creative direction. He moved on from his celebrated 'door' paintings to focus on a braoder scope of subjects including head, bodies, flowers, and other objects drawn from popular culture and daily life. Most of the paintings in this show began with a photograph, a 'found' image, traced and projected onto monumental aluminium supports and subsequently filled with high-gloss household paint. Hume favoured the brand Dulux for his tins of ready-made commercial paint: 'it's fluid, it sets, it's standard, it's recognisable... When you make a painting out of it, the material becomes beautiful. It transforms itself from a mundane material into a beautiful material'.This Way / That Way points to the instability inherent in Hume’s paintings from this time. The pools of pure colour are starkly delineated but the compositions seem to melt as our eye shuttles from one point to another across the image, making and unmaking form. Hume’s handling of the medium creates unexpected depth and movement. Applying thick coats of paint, the surfaces appear embossed, and the broad planes of sensual colour press insistently against one another as they reflect light: 'They’re apparent in the world; they’re apparent with light; they’re apparent with movement; they’re in constant flux'.
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I imagined that these were actually shifting tectonic plates, and I’m just freezing the shifting shape of all the constituent parts. The whole practice is a constant struggle to hold a shifting thing - Gary Hume
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So what is so new about the art in Sensation? Why has this art had such a public resonance, unparalleled in this country since the arrival of the Pop generation? The answer lies surely in this generation’s totally new and radical attitude to realism, or rather to reality and real life itself. – Norman Rosenthal, 1997
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SENSATION
Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1997
The exhibition, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection (Royal Academy, 1997) shocked audiences with its display of radical contemporary art. Almost ten years since the 1988 Freeze exhibition curated by Damien Hirst, the show further propelled the careers of the YBAs with the same spirit of audacity. Included in Sensation, Hume's Tony Blackburn (1993) typified the artist's unorthodox approach. Representing the radio DJ as a three-leaf clover - one leaf short of luck - the painting recalls Blackburn's on-air breakdown, a moment that broke the fourth wall and unpacked the illusion of entertainment. The thickly applied matt black clover, set in strong relief against bright and glossy pinks and yellows suggests this veneer of the projected and artificial self.
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GARY HUME THIS WAY / THAT WAY: Paintings from the 90s13 September - 26 October 202438 Bury Street, St James's, SW1Y 6BBMonday - Friday, 10:00 - 18:00Saturdays, 11:00 - 17:00Please click here to contact the gallery
