Hodgkin features in the Whitechapel Gallery’s ‘Accelerate your escape: Gary Hume explores the Hiscox Collection’

25 August 2020 – 3 January 2021, Whitechapel Gallery, London

From The Whitechapel Gallery’s website:

Selected by British Artist Gary Hume, important works by renowned artists including Etel Adnan, Darren Almond, Edward Burtynsky, Keith Coventry, Willie Doherty, Nan Goldin, Noemie Goudal, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, Alex Katz, Simon Keenleyside, Ron Nagle, Yves Oppenheim, Victor Pasmore, Tal R, Eduardo Paolozzi, Kathleen Ryan, Thomas Ruff, Prem Sahib, Haim Steinbach and Alison Wilding, are on public view for the first time from the Hiscox Collection. The series forms part of the Gallery’s ongoing commitment to showing rarely seen public and private collections.

For Hume, making and viewing art are a means of escape. Hume invites us to escape the every day and to find new joys and sorrows in the myriad worlds imagined for us by the artists he has selected.

Taking his title from a work by Haim Steinbach Hume explores the urge to ‘accelerate your escape’. Renowned for glossy hard-edged paintings inspired by pop and news media, Hume finds transcendence in colour and form. Luminous pigment glows in Yves Oppenheim’s vivid abstract painting, while modernist master Victor Pasmore uses line to suggest erotic, biomorphic forms. At the same time, Hume revels in the poetics of the everyday with Nan Goldin’s peeling bathroom suffused with light or Kathleen Ryan’s bejewelled sculpture of a rotting lemon.

The theme reveals unexpected story lines – Noemie Goudal’s concrete Observatory evokes a science fiction dystopia, while Keith Coventry’s bronze cast of a broken sapling is a poignant reminder of life in gritty council estates.

All these and hundreds of other works spanning the last five decades of contemporary art are featured in a book accompanying these displays.

More information launch