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GARY HUME (b. 1962) GIRL BOY, BOY GIRL signed and dated "Gary Hume 1991" on the reverse of each p...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:50,000.00 - 70,000.00 USD
GARY HUME (b. 1962) GIRL BOY, BOY GIRL signed and dated  Gary Hume 1991  on the reverse of each p...
GARY HUME
(b. 1962)
GIRL BOY, BOY GIRL
signed and dated "Gary Hume 1991"
on the reverse of each panel
enamel on two MDF boards
821/2 x 553/4 in.
(208.9 x 141.6 cm) each
821/4 x 1111/4 in.
(208.9 x 282.5 cm) overall
executed in 1991
ESTIMATE: $50,000-70,000
PROVENANCE
Acquired directly from the artist
EXHIBITED
LONDON, Whitechapel Art Gallery, GARY HUME, November 1999-January 2000, p. 78 (illustrated)
VENICE, XLVIII VENICE BIENNALE, BRITISH PAVILION, GARY HUME, June-November 1999, p. 78 (illustrated)
In the late 1980s, Gary Hume began a series of sophisticated monochrome paintings, which replicate in life-size, the swing doors in St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. Painted like the real hospital doors in slick, shiny household gloss paint, these works hover in a realm between abstraction and representation, and occupied Hume until 1992. Hume has said that the door "looked like a face, which I liked straight away, and it also looked like perfect modernism" (Hume quoted in GARY HUME XLVIII VENICE BIENNALE, 13 June - 7 November 1999, London, 1999, p. 11). The widely acclaimed door paintings thus questioned the relationship between reality and art, and positioned Hume within continuing modern art debates about the conflicting nature of painting as both independent objects and representations of some other reality.
The paintings, done in shiny household gloss enamel, were initially painted in magnolia to replicate the cold, institutional feel of such doors. Hume also incorporated the geometric shapes of windows and press panels described in the relief or direction of the paintwork. He subsequently began using experimental color schemes; such is the case with Girl Boy, Boy Girl of 1991. It is the reflective surfaces of the household gloss paint that interested Hume. "I like the high gloss finish which starts to have a life of its own because it reflects the environment that the paintings are shown in. In a hermetically sealed gallery, everything would be reflected within the painting, including yourself. So they made you think about light and about where the paintings begin and end" (Hume, quoted in THE TURNER PRIZE 1996, LONDON, 1996, unpaginated).