Gary Hume

Matthew Marks is pleased to present Gary Hume. The exhibition includes twenty new paintings made with household enamel on aluminum panels installed on a hand-painted mural.

The new paintings feature many familiar motifs in Hume’s work, including intertwined swans, flowers, and abstracted female figures, as well as new imagery drawn from the murals. The works demonstrate the artist’s distinctive approach to abstraction with a confounding balance of figure and image. “It has to have certain characteristics that are very clear to people. And it has to have characteristics that nobody really understands. Then that is a good painting,” Hume says.

The exhibition features Hume’s first site-specific murals, painted in acrylic and charcoal directly on the gallery walls. The drawings depict characters from children’s cartoons and are inspired by murals that were once installed in an immigration center for people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom. The murals were painted over in 2023, when the immigration minister decided they were too welcoming. Here, Hume recreates and memorializes the murals, building upon poignant, universal themes he has long explored in his work, including hope, loss, and vulnerability.

Gary Hume (b. 1962) lives and works in London. His work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at numerous museums, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, Tate Britain in London, and Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium. He represented Britain at the São Paulo Biennial in 1996 and the Venice Biennale in 1999.