Gary Hume (b.1962) came to prominence as a member of the Young British Artists generation who studied at Goldsmiths College in London. His work was included in both Freeze, an exhibition organised by Damien Hirst in 1988, and East Country Yard, a warehouse exhibition organised by Henry Bond and Sarah Lucas in 1990.

Door paintings, his first body of work from the late 1980s and early 1990s, consists of paintings that  recall the double swing doors of hospitals.

His oeuvre, often executed with high-gloss industrial paint on surfaces that include aluminium panels, infuses high modernist abstract formalism with an emphatic, sign-like quality. The London and New York-based artist develops his works from found images and personal memories, giving rise to a pictorial idiom in which horror and beauty, eroticism and melancholy, glamour and alienation, go hand in hand. His works are meditations on the sublime of the everyday, the fleetingness of memory and the fragility of life.

Many of his paintings – the superimposed nude outlines of the Water Paintings series (1999), for example, or the paintings and sculptures of his cheerleader-inspired American Tan series (2007) – exude an elusive sexual energy. Other works including his iconic, bronze Snowman sculptures (ongoing since 1997), have a dark, comic edge or make use of drastic, corporeal pictorial content, as exemplified by The Shit and The Cunt (both 2009).

Hume was awarded Great Britain’s 1997 Jerwood Painting Prize. In 2001, Hume was elected a Royal Academician.

Hume 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. 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 spent time working between his London studio and Accord, New York. He now lives and works in London.