Gary Hume - Contemporary Art Evening London Thursday, February 11, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Galerie Gebauer und Thumm, Berlin; Private Collection, Germany

  • Exhibited

    London, Tate Britain, The Turner Prize, October 29, 1996 - January 12, 1997

  • Catalogue Essay

    “Looking at Hume’s paintings, I sometimes experience a kind of deja vu: suddenly I’m back in the 1960s, in a world of second generation post-painterly abstractionists. Then in a children’s nursery, hung with mobiles and colouring book animals. But does a painting like Polar Bear, 1994, belong in a nursery? This opened-out, green, teddy-bear shape isn’t as benign as it looks. Nor are the animals in the Garden Paintings, 1996, whose images are drawn from a group of fifteenth-century French tapestries, La Dame a la licorne. Hume has kept remarkably close to the original, yet the paintings are anything but a mechanical or anonymous transposition. The animals are disquieting. They seem to be waiting, and watching. Hume’s Snowman is like this too, and if we think of it as a portrait, then we have found ourselves standing behind the figure, looking for a face that we will never see.
     
    “What remains is a strangeness, a sense of things frozen and suspended in the painting’s silence: an owl sitting on a branch, a rabbit munching a leaf, a closed door, bare feet on black grass, a face. Hume’s paintings sometimes allude to feelings – Scared, Begging For It, Fear, Poor Thing – but they don’t explain those feelings, nor do they illustrate them. Hume’s paintings present us with arrested images.”
     
    (Adrian Searle, ‘Behind the Face of the Door’, in exhibition catalogue, Gary Hume: Carnival, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 2004)

33

Garden Painting #2

1996
Enamel on aluminium.
170.2 x 221 cm. (67 x 87 in).
Signed, titled and dated 'Garden Painting 2 Gary Hume 96' on the reverse.

Estimate
£60,000 - 80,000 ‡♠

Contemporary Art Evening

12 Feb 2010
London