Artist: Gary Hume
Exhibition title: Destroyed School Paintings
Venue: Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium
Date: March 1 – May 31, 2020
Photography: Rik Vannevel / images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens
Note: Exhibition brochure is available here
Gary Hume (°1962) is linked to the YBA’s (Young British Artists), a group of conceptual artists that created a fuss in London in the early 1990s. Hume is known for his abstract paintings characteristically produced with industrial paint on aluminium relating as much to contemporary conflicts as to the vulnerability of human life. In his monumental paintings and sculptures, Hume often explores the hard-to-define boundaries between empathy, memory, beauty and violence.
The exhibition Destroyed School Paintings shows a new series of paintings stirred by recent conflicts in the Middle East. For two years, Hume collected photos from newspapers and magazines showing destroyed classrooms in these war zones. The remaining children’s drawings on the walls and blackboards are at the origin of the Destroyed School Paintings series. They are Hume’s response to the often, sensational images of war violence. The paintings are combined with a few Ghost Sculptures, a group of monumental, anthropomorphic sculptures based on Hume’s famous Wonky Wheels.
