Gary Hume: Door Paintings at Modern Art Oxford on artrepublic.com
Exhibition running from Jun 15 2008
until Aug 31 2008
Twenty years after Gary Hume emerged onto the British art scene with his large-scale paintings based on institutional doors, Modern Art Oxford presents the first-ever survey of this rich body of work. Hume showed his earliest Door Paintings in the now legendary Freeze exhibition in 1988, organised by Damien Hirst with fellow Goldsmiths students, which heralded a new generation of British artists. Hume’s seemingly abstract compositions, rendered in high-gloss, commercial house paint, were inspired by the institutional, swing doors of St. Bartholomew’s hospital in London’s East End. Praised for their play on the language of modernist abstraction and the democracy of their motif, the Door Paintings would form the basis of Hume’s artistic development. Some fifty Door Paintings make up the series. The exhibition presents eighteen of the most important works, from the mute elegance of the early Magnolia Doors and the Dolphin Paintings of the late 80s and early 90s, to the stylized anthropomorphism and brilliant colour of the aluminium panels of recent years. Suzanne Cotter, Deputy Director of Modern Art Oxford and curator of the exhibition, said: "Gary Hume is one of the most significant painters of his generation, unrivalled among his contemporaries in his conceptual elegance, sensuousness and unashamed use of colour as form. This exhibition of his Door Paintings offers the chance to rediscover these radically irresistible works and to follow his artistic development over the past two decades." Hume returned to the motif of the Doors in 1998 when commissioned by the Hayward Gallery to make a new work for the outside of the building. In the early 2000s, the Doors reappeared alongside his figurative paintings of people, flora and fauna. OPENING HOURS: Tue - Sat: 10.00 - 17.00 Sun: 12.00 - 17.00 Image Credits: Image 1: Gary Hume, Dream, 1991, Gloss paint on panel, 211 x 140 cm, ©Gary Hume, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York Slide Show: Gary Hume, Girl boy, boy girl, 1990/91, Gloss paint on MDF (two panels), 210 x 282 cm, ©Gary Hume, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York Gary Hume, Shine, 2001, Gloss paint on aluminium, 305 x 200 cm, ©Gary Hume, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York Gary Hume, Four Doors I, 1989/90, Oil on canvas (four parts), 239 x 594 cm, Private Collection, Courtesy White Cube, London  |
