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Contemporary Art, Painting

Gary Hume

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.

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Contemporary Art, Drawing, Modern Art, Painting, Sculpture

Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting

Gagosian Gallery, New York, New York
April 15 to July 11, 2025


In spring–summer 2025, Gagosian’s Chelsea space at 555 West 24th Street reopened with “Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting,” curated by Cecilia Alemani (High Line Art). The exhibition ran from April 15 and was extended through July 11, 2025.

Although frequently described as “retrospective-like,” it was more accurately a deliberately edited, museum-caliber survey: 24 works spanning 1944–1986, installed across the gallery’s rooms in a way that encouraged viewers to read de Kooning’s career as recursive rather than linear. (The show’s checklist numbers 24 objects, including two bronzes and 22 paintings; this “distillation” was part of its point.)

What made the show feel unusually “retrospective” for a commercial gallery wasn’t only the historical range, but also its curatorial thesis and its institutional muscle. Alemani and Gagosian secured significant museum loans—most prominently MoMA’s “Untitled V” (1982) and the Guggenheim’s “…Whose Name Was Writ in Water” (1975).

The title “Endless Painting” functions as both description and argument. In the supporting materials around the show, the phrase is explicitly linked to de Kooning’s “ever-evolving” pictorial language and to his oft-cited habit of stopping rather than finishing—“just stop”—a stance that frames revision, scraping-back, and perpetual re-beginning as the medium’s true subject.

Alemani’s key curatorial move was to reject a strictly chronological narrative in favor of what she described (in preview coverage) as an exhibition that “skips and jumps” and “creates rhymes” across decades. In practical terms, this meant engineering sightlines and adjacencies that made repetition legible: a 1940s work could “echo” a late ribbon painting; an iconic mid-career figure could be made to reverberate against a near-abstract contour from the 1980s.

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