Although the two Back of a Snowman sculptures present in the John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park are displayed together, they are actually two distinct examples of a larger series of sculptures that are identical in their dimensions but vary in color. The simplified form that British artist, Gary Hume, refers to as “snowman” also appears in a series of paintings and prints.

In the audio guides available for free to Sculpture Park visitors, the Des Moines Art Center’s assistant curator Laura Burkhalter speaks with great interest about the works’ glossy surfaces. The work of the Young British Artists (YBA) group, with which Hume is often associated, has many affinities with the brightly colored, high-impact imagery that Pop artists borrowed from the graphic culture of advertising. The surfaces of Back of a Snowman are covered in enamel, evoking the haptics of pearls or a new plastic toy. Hume, who is best known as a painter, would be at home with these rich surfaces and textures. Back of a Snowman also embodies the playfulness characteristic of Hume’s other work. Playfulness is present in the sculptures’ overwhelming, larger-than-human size, in their evocation of subjects and surfaces associated with childhood, such as toys and snowmen; and finally, in their names. As Burkhalter points out, the title “Back of a Snowman” gives the viewer the impression that there is a front and a back to the sculptures, when in reality, the rounded forms are identical from all available viewpoints. Thus, the notions of interaction and participation—major preoccupations for many artists since the 1960s—are made into something paradoxical, impossible, even extravagant.