Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon”

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, New York November 10 to December 22, 2023

These new works are signature Gary Hume: slick, flat, and glossy. He explores his languid forms with household alkyd paint, leaning, in this case, toward abstraction. The shapes are seemingly unchallenging and easy to digest — is this the visual equivalent of Nickelback? — although the color palette has some interesting dissonance. The motif of swans heads is scattered through the paintings, but they are abstracted and non-specific in their storytelling.

The housepaint used is interesting as some of the early work that established his reputation is starting to effloresce, as house paint alkyd contains different sets of acids than fine arts paints. The substrate is aluminum, which Hume has found balances the need for a visually perfectly flat surface with lightness, strength, and stability.

The questions on this work revolve around the level of seriousness. Is this work glib? Is it overly stylized? Does it have a narrative tension? Not sure that this is much more than law firm conference room art.

Hume (England, 1962) works in both London and the Catskills, New York, although recently put the Catskills studio up on the market.

Mike Weiss Gallery, New York, April 10, 2014 – May 10, 2014

Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, August 21, 2024–February 23, 2025

At Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center, Livien Yin’s exhibition “Livien Yin: Thirsty” (on view August 21, 2024–February 23, 2025) is an intimate, single-gallery show in the Ruth Levison Halperin Gallery and marked Yin’s first solo museum exhibition. The exhibition brought together new and recent paintings shaped by a research-driven practice: Yin stages luminous, fictional vignettes—often casting friends as models—to collapse past and present and draw connective threads between contemporary life and historical Asian American figures and environments. A central historical anchor is the story of Chinese “paper sons and daughters” during the Chinese Exclusion Act era; Yin draws from historic photographs while using the absences and gaps in the archival record as a productive space to imagine possible realities

I’m also drawn to her formal style which evokes for me a sort of paint-by-numbers vibe (I mean this in the best, most complementary way), where local color shifts are not smoothed together in their modelling but are stepped like layers.

https://livienyin.com/
https://museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/livien-yin-thirsty
https://lahstalon.org/at-the-cantor-spirit-house-and-livien-yin-explore-asian-american-identity/