Gary Hume
Gary Stewart Hume is an English artist, who ives and works in London and upstate New York, USA. His work is strongly identified with the YBA [Young British Artists] artists who came to prominence in the early-1990s. Hume is renowned for paintings distinguished by a bright palette, reduced imagery and flat areas of seductive color. While Hume’s paintings have always emphasized their luscious surfaces and simplified forms. Hume first received critical acclaim with a body of minimal and abstract works. Their high gloss paint and insistent reflective surfaces, developed in the early 1990s into a broader set of motifs, such as the nude, the portrait, the garden, as well as a pictorial idiom drawn from childhood, with images of polar bears, snowmen, rabbits, owls and close-up faces. His subject matter broadened yet more through the mid 1990s to incorporate images from popular culture, making portraits of celebrity figures.
Hume represented Britain at the 1999 Venice Biennale. Hume was elected a Royal Academician in 2001. His solo shows include São Paulo Bienal (1996), the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (1999), Fundação La Caixa, Barcelona (2000), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2003), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2004) and the Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2004). Group shows include Tate Britain, London (2004), Louisiana Museum, Denmark (2004), Kunsthalle Basel (2002) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2001).