British Council British Council Visual Arts

Gary Hume was born in Kent in 1962 and studied at Liverpool Polytechnic and Goldsmiths College in London. In 1996 he was short listed for the Turner Prize and his work was shown at the São Paulo Bienal; he was awarded the Jerwood Prize for Painting the following year and in 1999 represented Britain with a solo exhibition in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Hume lives and works in London and upstate New York, USA.

Hume is best known for his paintings of bright, flat colour combinations, which he produces using household gloss paint. He came to prominence in the early 1990s with a series of works known as Door paintings, simplified images of hospital doors in highly reflective gloss paint. He then expanded his subject matter to include other motifs such as the portrait, the nude, and the garden. In Hume's portraits in particular, we see his interests in popular culture by his choice of subjects such as fashion model Kate Moss. For the 1999 Venice Biennale he produced a series of large scale overlapping line drawings of nudes entitled Water Paintings. More recently, for his exhibition Cave Paintings at Whitecube in London in 2006, Hume incorporated different types of stone such as marble and lead into his work, carving them by hand and presenting them together as collages.

The graphic quality of Hume's work lends itself to printmaking, in particular screenprints. Hume has produced a number of screenprints alongside his paintings, including the series The Sister Troop (2009), a group of ten prints on brushed aluminium.

Selected solo exhibitions include
Yard Work, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York 2009
American Tan, Whitecube, London 2007
Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover
Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2004
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2003
Fundação la Caixa, Barcelona, 2000
Whitechapel Art Gallery, London and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 1999

Selected group exhibitions include
Art Is For The Spirit: From the UBS Art Collection, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2008
Aftershock: Contemporary British Art 1990-2006 Capital Museum, Beijing and Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou 2006-7
Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi collection, London, to Berlin and subsequently New York, 1997-9
Brilliant!: New Art from London at Minneapolis, and Houston, 1995-6.

Hume was also one of the young artists to exhibit in the seminal exhibition Freeze in 1988 along with other artists such as Mat Collishaw and Sarah Lucas.

Made in Britain Contemporary Art from the British Council Collection 1980-2010,China federation of Literary and Art Circles Publishing Corporation 2010. ISBN 978-7-5059-7014-4.

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