Dave Hickey

Gary Hume: Yardwork Dave Hickey

Gary Hume (born 1962) first found acclaim in London in the late 1980s, when his bold paintings of hospital doors, rendered at life-size scale in high-gloss hardware store paints on aluminum panels, drew much attention and ushered Hume into the ranks of the Young British Artists. Twenty years later, Yardwork features recent paintings and sculpture completed by Gary Hume in his upstate New York studio. The pictures explore familiar themes in Hume's work, including flowers, birds, doors and female figures. In the new work, however, the doors are now barn doors, as opposed to the hospital doors found in his earlier works; the blackbirds, roses and daisies are all things he sees from his window, not images drawn from books or media. Yardwork includes an essay by Dave Hickey that places Hume's paintings in the context of a group of artists the author names abstractionists of daily life.