An artist renowned for innovative usage of color, line and surface

Curated by Katharine Stout, Tate Britain hosts a show of works by Gary Hume, part of the internationally celebrated group of ‘Young British Artists’ who studied at London’s Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s,

Gary Hume (born 1962) is considered one of Britain’s highly respected painters. This focused survey spans his career that explores the breadth and vitality of his work. It includes many well known and recent paintings apart from international loans to highlight his innovative usage of color, line and surface in his distinctive compositions. Below are some important milestones of his career and key facets of the oeuvre:   

• Gary Hume was born in Kent in 1962 and now lives and works in London and upstate New York, USA. He studied at Liverpool Polytechnic and later Goldsmiths and within a year of his graduation in 1988 his work was being exhibited internationally. Since then his work has been seen in solo and important group exhibitions around the world.
• Hume first received critical acclaim in the early 1990s with his bold, large-scale paintings which used high gloss paint to create planes of industrial colour. These were initially seen in the near-legendary 1988 Freeze exhibition organised by Hume’s fellow student Damien Hirst. 
• An early focus on institutional doors evolved over subsequent decades to encompass a range of subjects: figures such as mothers and babies, friends and celebrities from Tony Blackburn to Kate Moss as well as images drawn from nature or childhood including flowers, birds and snowmen.
• Through this surprisingly varied set of motifs, Hume explores the full spectrum of emotional response from wonder and joy to melancholy and loss. Conventional ideas of beauty are frequently countered by a darker, more questioning sense of the world and recognizable forms are sometimes fragmented to near abstraction.
• The exhibition brings together around twenty-four striking paintings frequently poised between abstraction and representation. The original source image is often left far behind as shapes emerge in the paintings through vibrant areas of colour and line is articulated as thin ridges of paint that disrupt the surface and the eye.