The first door paintings by artist Gary Hume appeared in the seminal exhibition Freeze in 1988, curated by Damien Hirst - and propelled many - including the aforementioned curator, to genuine art stardom.
With some fifty paintings in total and eighteen on display; their aesthetic tension lies in a physical sensuality rendered in high-gloss house paint often on material such as aluminum.
Inspired by the numerous swing doors that were once to be found within St. Bartholomew’s hospital in London’s East End during that same period; the works social import and historical context - evoking the suffering caused by those years of Thatcherism and its under-funding of the public health system [sorrow and squalor in abundance] – has given way to a slick conceptual ‘coolness’, heralding a formal and thematic dialect concerning colour and light, reflecting the generic and impersonal nature of the 'institutional'. With motifs of frames, windows, and kick-plates of hospital doors - rendered in thick layers of household gloss and being literally architectural in scale - as Hume states; "less like images of doors than simply door-like".
These bodies of paintings became influential for Hume’s career and artistic development, and were lauded for their monumental presence and remarkable elegance. Although grand, they had a sublime nature, and even possessed a genuine austerity; but they were also sensual, subtle, and sometimes virtually invisible, as Hume reflects; "Even though they were blank, they were democratic in their subject matter and their apparent lack of artistic ego. They seemed to respond to the painting versus sculpture dilemma yet still be a picture. They were blankly satisfying". Yet these works also summoned reminiscences of Rothko’s immanent use of colour, Pollock’s enamels, even raising a dialogue between the nature of painting and sculpture: sharing ground with Julian Opie's die-cut works - and the very nature of the Duchampian ready-made.
With the image appropriated from a real (and depressing) reality, these paintings posed an age old question concerning the nature of art's relationship to representation, with a seemingly slick abandon and accurate scale, the viewer; at a glance, may have mistaken the works with that of their origin; the door itself. Only the reflective nature of aluminum, and use of colour creating an allusive surface that the viewer often found hard to capture, returned the work to an exercise in reading. Hume shows us the quintessential take on non-representational, modernist abstraction. "I realized that every door was aspiration – or class-based in its appearance. It was a fraught time and the doors were a kind of statement to all the so-called ‘meritocratists’ that we all come from the same place, to do a painting of one of the last things you might see"
- as the double doors of the hospital corridor swing back and forth behind you.
Gary Hume: Door Paintings can be seen at Modern Art, Oxford 15 June to 31 August 2008
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