Gary Hume at Matthew Marks Gallery: Sixteen New Paintings and a Wall Mural

Matthew Marks Gallery at 523 West 24th Street in Chelsea is showing new work by the British painter Gary Hume through October 24. The exhibition centers on sixteen paintings made in 2026 with household enamel paint on aluminum panels. They hang on a mural painted by hand directly onto the gallery walls.

Hume was born in 1962 and lives and works in London. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums including the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, Tate Britain in London, and Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium. He represented Britain at the São Paulo Biennial in 1996 and at the Venice Biennale in 1999.

The paintings return to motifs familiar from his practice: intertwined swans, flowers, and abstracted female figures. New imagery drawn from the murals joins them. Titles include The Park, Revelation, Maze, Before language, Lilac wine, Green youth, Graylings, and Tilt, all enamel on aluminum. Hume describes his ideal painting as one with qualities that are very clear to viewers and qualities that no one quite understands, and the works keep figure and image in a deliberately unsettled balance.

The murals are the show's most distinctive element and Hume's first site-specific ones. Painted in acrylic and charcoal, they depict characters from children's cartoons. They take their cue from murals once installed in a UK immigration center for people seeking asylum. Those murals were painted over in 2023, after the immigration minister judged them too welcoming. Hume recreates and memorializes them here, extending themes he has long explored: hope, loss, and vulnerability.

The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM. With the show closing soon, it fits easily into a Chelsea gallery walk.