White Cube

Events at White Cube

• Gary Hume: The Indifferent Owl at White Cube: Hoxton Square

  Art

  18 Jan 2012 to 25 Feb 2012

  Gary Hume first received critical acclaim with a body of work known as the 'Door' paintings. These minimal and abstract works developed in the early 1990s into a broader set of motifs, such as the nude, the portrait, the garden, as well as a pictorial idiom drawn from childhood, with images of polar bears, snowmen, rabbits, owls and close-up faces. His subject matter broadened yet more through the mid 1990s to incorporate images from popular culture, making portraits of celebrity figures such as Tony Blackburn, Kate Moss and Patsy Kensit. For the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1999), he produced the 'Water Paintings', large-scale works of multiple, overlapping line drawings of nudes punctuated by flat areas of colour. Hume's 'Cave Paintings' are marble tableaux composed of a variety of different stones set against each other in collaged sections that appear like tectonic plates. These are held together by a lead tracery that provides the edge to the expanses of colour, traced by the natural faults and veins inherent in the stone itself. These monolithic compositions combine motifs from the natural world with imagery suggestive of fundamental emotions.