Child's Play: Gary Hume

Gary Hume, a member of the YBA (Young British Artists), gained artistic recognition in the early 1990s, having graduated from Goldsmith College and showed in Damien Hirst’s exhibition Freeze, both in 1988. As a member of the YBA, Hume exhibited art that presented a shock value. He simplified color and form significantly, reducing his subjects to a few potent hues. This drastic simplification renders his work flat, demanding a greater significance be paid to the surface than the detailed rendering of subject. Abandoning the traditional oil paint medium, many of Hume, in many of his early paintings, opted for household glossy paint. Hume favored this alternative medium for its shiny, reflective effect, yielding a slate for viewers to see their own reflections. Not only did this high glass paint achieve a (self-)reflective function, it simultaneously, and in opposition, preserved them within “a hermetically sealed, impenetrable perfection.” While Hume moved away from this medium, he managed to maintain a similar effect through screenprinting.

Gary Hume achieves a similarly polished effect through screenprinting his images on paper. Humes renders these prints, inspired by photographic portraits and imagination, into vibrant “color-by-numbers” perfections. Hume confines each color within it’s own delineated space, never blending or layering. In his Portraits series, body parts and facial features become uncomplicated studies of color relationships. This surprisingly sophisticated exploration of form and color exposes a more conceptual consideration of what lies on the surface versus what lies beneath; Hume intrigues viewers to consider how process of creating an image reflects the subject being represented.

Consider Young Woman (1998).  This close-up portrait portrays an androgynous-looking character, flattened by blocks of color. Solidly brown hair, a flesh-tone face, mustard lips, a single yellow eyebrow, and two differently colored eyes, one brown and one blue. The background, separated in certain areas by a while line, is composed of three colors—flesh-tone, yellow, and reddish-orange. With highly refined facial features and an exceedingly stylized surface, viewer’s first read of this print is calmingly straightforward, even familiar. The more time spent engaged in a conversation of eye contact, however, she becomes more menacing. The contrast in eye color is jarring, daring even, as she wavers between fading into the background to her left and popping out from the highly differentiated background color to her right. 

Similar in composition, Cerith (1998), from the same Portrait series, frames a face and neck among a monochromatic background of saturated yellow. Hume reduces Cerith’s face to a flat gray plane interrupted by pale, eyelash heavy eyes. A blob of royal blue hair sits atop this figures head, and a perfectly round pink dot punctuates her cheek, as if stamped with a pre-made rubber form. Angel (1998), too, reduces the subject of the print to face and neck. Set atop an olive-green background, a halo of yellow hair, radiating outwards, encircles a white face. Like Young Woman, basic contours outline two different colored eyes. Yet the subject glances up, not at the viewer, appearing more hopeful. The precision with which Hume draws each outlined form is delicate, decisive, and purposeful. While the lines of the neck end abruptly, as if to disregard the imagined connected body, akin to childlike tendencies, each line is drawn with beautiful softness that adds to the ease of the overall aesthetic.

Francis Bacon (1998) is one of the more light-hearted and playful prints of the series. With bright red lips, vibrant yellow eyes, and ten whimsical strands of pink hair pasted upon an unshapely brown head, Bacon’s face resembles the childhood game Mr. Potato Head. Bacon stares, again with two different colored eyes, straight ahead at the viewer. Yet the color relationships and more abstracted features demand a less threatening reading. Splotches of pink breakup the light-blue background, clouds of off-white float in flat space, and the brown face disagrees with the pale-nude of Bacon’s neck and shoulders. Yet, as we experienced in Angel, each line, each plane, each color, maintains a specific function, deliberate in application, to achieve a Hume’s desired effect. 

Gary Hume, Young Woman, 1998

Screenprint on paper

Gary Hume, Cerith, 1997

Gloss paint on aluminum panel

Gary Hume, Angel, 1998

Screenprint on paper

Gary Hume, Francis Bacon, 1998

Screenprint on paper