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 broader scope of subjects, including heads, 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’.
