In Gary Hume: The Wonky Wheel, the renowned British artist updates the genre of history painting for the twenty-first century. With the 18 paintings and three sculptures gathered in this volume--all new and never before published--Hume unveils colorful abstractions rooted in contemporary conflict and the fragility of human life. If these most recent works are, as Hume himself stresses, a form of history painting--representations of a series of "pregnant moments" connected to one of the great historical dramas of our time--Hume short-circuits this notion by rendering their historical scenes all but invisible, thus apparently declaring his disinterest in any narrative whatsoever. Nonetheless, these moments form the building blocks of the work. History's forward progress is constant, Hume's art proposes, but it is always wonky.

Gary Hume (born 1962) first found acclaim in London in the late 1980s, when his bold paintings of hospital doors, rendered at life-size scale in high-gloss hardware store paints on aluminum panels, drew much attention and ushered Hume into the ranks of the Young British Artists. Twenty years later, Yardwork features recent paintings and sculpture completed by Gary Hume in his upstate New York studio. The pictures explore familiar themes in Hume's work, including flowers, birds, doors and female figures. In the new work, however, the doors are now barn doors, as opposed to the hospital doors found in his earlier works; the blackbirds, roses and daisies are all things he sees from his window, not images drawn from books or media. Yardwork includes an essay by Dave Hickey that places Hume's paintings in the context of a group of artists the author names abstractionists of daily life.

This is a survey of the work of British painter Gary Hume, one of the leading figures of the YBAs or Young British Artists.

Gary Hume (b. 1962) is renowned for paintings distinguished by a bright palette, reduced imagery, and flat areas of seductive color. While Hume's paintings have always emphasized their luscious surfaces and simplified forms, many are infused with a melancholic beauty. Hume first received critical acclaim with a body of work known as the "Door" paintings. These minimal and abstract works, with their high-gloss paint and insistent reflective surfaces, developed in the early 1990s into a broader set of motifs, such as the nude, the portrait, the garden, as well as a pictorial idiom drawn from childhood, with images of polar bears, snowmen, rabbits, owls and close-up faces. His subject matter broadened yet more through the mid 1990s to incorporate images from popular culture, making portraits of celebrity figures such as Kate Moss, British radio DJ Tony Blackburn, and actress Patsy Kensit. For the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1999), he produced the "Water Paintings," large-scale works of multiple, overlapping line drawings of nudes punctuated by flat areas of color. "Cave Paintings," the title of his most recent show at White Cube, featured seven marble tableaux composed of a variety of different stones set against each other in collaged sections that appear like tectonic plates. These are held together by a lead tracery that provides the edge to the expanses of color, traced by the natural faults and veins inherent in the stone itself. These monolithic compositions are hand-carved and richly decadent, combining visual motifs from the natural world with imagery suggestive of human birth and fundamental emotions. Gary Hume was born in Kent in 1962 and lives and works in London and upstate New York. Solo shows include São Paulo Bienal (1996), Venice Biennale (1999) Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1999), the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (1999), Fundação La Caixa, Barcelona (2000), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2003), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2004) and the Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2004). Group shows include Tate Britain, London (2004), Louisiana Museum, Denmark (2004), Kunsthalle Basel (2002), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2001).

In his latest body of work Hume focuses on a range of subjects, but at its core is a suite of highly personal paintings about memory and loss. His mother is 86 years old and suffers from dementia. And while the ostensible subjects of many of the new paintings are flowers, their titles ? Mourning, Spent, Blind ? reflect Hume?s thoughts of her. Mum on the Couch (2017), a more direct portrait, depicts the artist?s aging mother in her current condition, a poignant contrast to the vibrant woman of her son?s memories.00This catalogue includes large-format full-color reproductions of more than thirty new works. In addition to Hume?s signature aluminum panels, he recently began painting on large sheets of paper. His preferred paint, a highly reflective household gloss, creates textures and reflections on the paper that become an integral part of the work. As Alexander Nagel writes in the essay, ?Apparitions of shifting light and shade playing over the surface, we are always part of their subject matter.?00Exhibition: Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, USA (04.11.-22.12.2017).

This book includes colour photographs of Gary Hume's work. There is an essay at the start by David Anfam and a transcript of Gary Hume in conversation with Ulrich Loock.