The painter and graphic artist Gary Hume counts among the most important "Young British Artists".
Gary Hume was born in Tenterden (Kent) in 1962 . After he worked as film editor for some time, Gary Hume initially studied at Liverpool Polytechnic (1985/86) and then at the London Goldsmith's College until 1988, where he met other emergent artists that would later gain international renown as "Young British Artists" (YBA). Along with Damien Hirst, Angela Bulloch and Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume is another main representative of this movement. He showed works at the legendary "Freeze" exhibition in 1988, which is regarded the founding exhibition of YBA gilt. Gary Hume also participated in the later shows "Brilliant!" (1995/96) and "Sensation" (1997-2000).
Gary Hume is the most reserved representative of this generation of artists. His pictures, based on strong colors and simplified forms, are rather meditative than loud. Gary Hume brings formal simplification of figurative motifs to a point that his works at times touch realms of abstraction. His choice of colors and subjects put Gary Hume near Pop-Art.
His series "Doors" – symbolically charged lacquer paintings of doors made in the 1980s, contributed to his fame. Later Gary Hume was predominantly occupied with animals, humans and plants, executed in simplified silhouette forms. In the late1990s Gary Hume made outlines of nudes laid on top of each other on a monochrome priming. Next to paintings, Gary Hume is also occupied with graphic methods such as silkscreen and linocut.
Important international museums are in possession of works by Gary Hume, among them the London Tate Modern, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Bonnefanten-Museum in Maastricht or the New Yorker Metropolitan Museum. Gary Hume, who won the "Jerwood Painting Prize" in 1997 after he had been nominated for the Turner-Prize (1996), lives and works in London and Accord/New York.