Gary Hume

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce _Gary Hume_, the next exhibition in his gallery at 523 West 24th Street. The exhibition includes sixteen new paintings made with household enamel on aluminum panels installed on a hand-painted mural. The new paintings feature many familiar motifs in Hume's work, including intertwined swans, flowers, and abstracted female figures, as well as new imagery drawn from the murals. The works demonstrate the artist's distinctive approach to abstraction with a confounding balance of figure and image. "It has to have certain characteristics that are very clear to people. And it has to have characteristics that nobody really understands. Then that is a good painting," Hume says. The exhibition features Hume's first site-specific murals, painted in acrylic and charcoal directly on the gallery walls. The drawings depict characters from children's cartoons and are inspired by murals that were once installed in an immigration center for people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom. The murals were painted over in 2023, when the immigration minister decided they were too welcoming. Here, Hume recreates and memorializes the murals, building upon poignant, universal themes he has long explored in his work, including hope, loss, and vulnerability.