Gary Hume is best known for his figurative and abstract paintings on aluminum panels, which often feature startling color combinations made with a high-gloss household enamel paint. He develops his imagery from both personal memory and found images. Depicting motifs ranging from flowers to animals, celebrities, and portraits of friends and family, his work explores painting’s ability to simultaneously produce beauty and pleasure alongside empathy, melancholy, and a sense of loss. “There’s no cathartic process in painting,” he has said. “I only get pleasure while there’s a problem and I solve it. And then, of course, as soon as that’s done I need to make another problem.”

Gary Hume (b. 1962) represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and the São Paulo Bienal in 1996, the same year he was nominated for the Turner Prize. His work was the subject of a one-person exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1999, and in 2001 he was elected to the Royal Academy. Since then he has had one-person exhibitions at institutions across Europe, including the Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover, Tate Britain in London, Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Modern Art Oxford, and Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium. Hume lives and works in London and Accord, New York.