Gary Hume, Back of a Snowman
October 8, 2002 - April 20, 2003

The British artist Gary Hume first used the snowman motif in 1996 with the painting Snowman. In several respects it's typical of his best-known work. It's marked by Hume's signature gesture, which involves the use of high-gloss commercial paint that he applies to an aluminum support, maximizing the paint's reflective potential. The artist also adumbrates Snowman with the simplest forms — a smaller beige circle resting on a larger red one, both set against a bipartite ground of pale blue and gray. Without the benefit of its title one could easily take this for an abstraction. The painting's loose, "irresponsible" skidding between abstract and representational modes, as well as its jangled, deliberately "off" palette, are no less characteristic of Hume.

Adrian Searle, in his catalogue essay for Hume's installation in the British Pavilion at the 1999 Venice Biennial, describes the genesis of the snowman iconography: "A few winters ago Hume and a friend built a snowman on a hill in the Peak District, in the north of England. They coloured the snow with food dye and took photographs of it." Subsequent to the painting Snowman, Hume did five photographs of snowmen in landscape settings, also employing food dyes in green, black, red, and red-yellow variations (one remained snow white). A series ofenamel-painted bronze snowman sculptures followed. The new sculpture that Hume has done for Creative Time's Battery Park installation, Back of a Snowman, is plain white, but it's much bigger — monumental, if not necessarily abominable.

In an interview in Tate (Summer 1999), Hume likens his paintings to Byzantine icons and adds that the snowman "is an important image to me. It's like the whole painting thing, really, being stuck as myself, and there's the horizon. That's the back of the snowman, looking out at the horizon, and you're looking at the back of the snowman, so it's a very romantic-pathetic image, because, you know, fine weather's going to come." Ergo, the snowman, which Hume regards as a kind of self-portrait, is going to melt. Shiny surfaces don't preclude a sense of wistfulness, and icons as imperturbably simple as the snowman accrue an ambivalent emotional charge. Consider Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man":

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

One catches a sharp glint of Stevens's meditative lyric in Hume's faceless, "romantic-pathetic" snowman sculptures, viewed always from the back even as one circumambulates them in the round.

David Rimanelli