Courtesy White Cube, London, © 2008 Gary Hume

Gary Hume, "Black Door with Sash" (2006). Gloss paint on aluminum, 78 3/4 x 63 3/4 in.

October 2008 Reviews

Manifesta 7

Jeff Koons

Chantal Akerman

Painting: Now and Forever, Part II

Erkka Nissinen

There is No There There

Elaine Duigenan

Kerry James Marshall

Peter Saul

John Massey

Bridget Riley

Pipilotti Rist

Thomas Helbig

Armando Andrade Tudela

Marine Hugonnier

Gary Hume Cult of Personality Landy’s Tate Exhibit Shows Tinguely’s “Destructive” Influence Realizing an American Dream ShContemporary on Solid Footing, Despite Setbacks Inside Man 10 Tomes The High Life

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It is 20 years since Gary Hume exhibited his first “Door Paintings.” Inspired by an advert for health insurance featuring a decrepit National Health Infirmary, they’re large-scale, formally simple—featuring circles for porthole windows and kickplates reduced to Band-aid blocks of color—and, numbering 50 in total, are the dominating body of the British artist’s career. Though metaphors for entering and exiting life, the paintings also convey a sociopolitical meaning: bearing in mind that the Thatcher government was blamed for the health service’s decline, they’ve become somehow emblematic of all Britain’s ills. Hume was not ignorant of such connotations. The sludgy browns and sickly pinks of Mushroom Door (1988) and Incubus (1991) atmospherically evoke the unpleasant neglect common to public spaces In the late 1980s and early ’90s; and the series “magnolia doors” (1989–90)—painted from the most boringly predictable “non”-color favorite for the family home—transports us into the domestic interiors of middle england. If these works hit the mark (the reflective nature of the noncolor gloss thrusting the viewers’ faces back at themselves), one or two paintings also miss it: the cutesy, color-coded circles of Girl Boy, Boy Girl (1990–91) for example. Hume apparently became trapped by what he’d begun (as titles such as My Guernica [1992] suggest), but it’s encouraging to see that even though he’s departed to explore new art forms, subjects, and materials, time and again he returns—now to a more wonky, gestural, and fluid approach, as with Black Door with Sash (2006), but still to the door. "Gary Hume" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.