What lies beneath | 24 August 2017

Last year, Gary Hume made a painting of himself paddling. At a casual glance, or even a longer look, it might not appear to be what it is. What you see is a wrinkled, pinkish surface with a sort of dome of curving green and blueish shapes at the bottom. This, to Hume, is a sort of self-portrait as a child at the seaside. ‘I’m on the beach, I’ve got the ripples going around my ankles making little coloured shapes, and all the sand.’

Hume’s paintings are like that. They may look abstract, but it turns out that they are startlingly real. One from some years ago consists of six shiny black rectangles with yellow bars between them. In one way, it’s a recycling of one of the best known of all abstract paintings, Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ of 1915; in another, it’s a startling piece of realism, exactly what a dark window looks like at night.

If you peer into Hume’s paintings, you can see your own reflection. That’s because his medium of choice is not oils or watercolour, but household gloss. Consequently, his paintings have the smooth, reflective quality of a well-painted door. And indeed, doors — the big swing-type ones through which you enter a hospital ward or operating theatre — were the subject of the first series of works with which Hume came to fame.

Again, these looked like arrangements of circles and oblongs (the windows and panels on the doors). At the same time, they were almost facsimiles of reality: door-shaped objects, painted in gloss you could buy at a hardware store.

Initially, Hume was associated with the Young British Artists of the 1990s such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. With the softly beautiful quality of his work in mind, however, and the household gloss, you might say that he was as much DIY as YBA.