Courtesy of White Cube
About the Work
Gary Hume’s Minimalist portrait of Michael Jackson reveals only a portion of the musician’s face, peering through a circular opening, and surrounded by a white border. In Michael, Hume employs his trademark bold shapes and strong planes to create a powerful representation of the King of Pop, whose face is so iconic that it is instantly recognizable even when cropped and reduced to its most essential elements.
It was Michael Jackson’s peculiarity and celebrity status that inspired Hume to create this portrait. Though the work is indicative of Hume’s interest in misplacement and deformity—the ghostly white face, the doodled nose, the spidery lines on the cheeks and forehead—the image is neither grotesque nor farcical. Rather, it is highly personal and articulates an elegant, damaged beauty. "I tried to be as sympathetic as I could," says Hume. "I wasn't in any sense trying to ridicule him. I feel for him."
About the Artist
British artist Gary Hume is known for his brightly-colored, Minimalist paintings, which are usually figurative, yet highly reduced and abstracted. Hume favors bold shapes, flat planes of color, high gloss paint, and reflective surfaces. Stripping his subjects of inessentials allows him to highlight their most compelling details and to create subtle displacements and deformities that slightly disrupt the careful construction of his compositions. Simple in style, yet complex in its denial of easy interpretation, Hume’s work is at once Minimalist, Surreal, Pop, and Conceptual. He says, "Art is not about absolute concrete affirmations. Art has questions and doubts and ups and downs of preference."
Hume first achieved critical acclaim in the early 1990s for his series Doors, life-sized paintings of institutional doors. His subject matter then broadened to nudes, portraits, gardens, animals, and pop culture images. Notable exhibitions include his large-scale overlapping line drawings of nudes for his series Water Paintings shown at the 1999 Venice Biennale, and his 2006 solo show Cave Paintings at White Cube, which featured marble tableaux of collaged stones set together like tectonic plates.
