Bird Point lll 1998

Curator: Before us is Gary Hume’s "Bird Point III," painted in 1998. The medium is acrylic on aluminum. Editor: It’s so cheerful! Like looking through a colourful, oddly shaped window onto a world seen through stained glass or kaleidoscopic lenses. The hard edges and bold color blocks are immediately striking. Curator: Precisely. Hume is associated with hard-edge painting, taking visual cues from Pop Art to create clean lines, solid areas of often industrially-derived colours, and smooth surfaces. I’m fascinated by his deliberate application of materials. There’s a real precision, and yet also, the sense of mass production techniques made manually. The aluminum surface resists brushstrokes—each plane reads so cleanly. Editor: But consider the socioeconomic and historical elements feeding that choice. This was created during a very specific art market boom, a context driving the prices for minimalist, formally abstract works up while access to quality studio materials becomes even more restrictive for the othered. Whose production can become mass while other artists can’t even find what they need to create in the first place? That yellow might pop but that historical positioning feels like acid. Curator: I see your point. Perhaps there's an irony intended with the apparent "cheerfulness" clashing with the historical backdrop. This tension almost underscores the labor-intensive process. Each shape requires masking and multiple layers of acrylic to achieve that immaculate surface, resisting that read of it being something simple or carelessly reproduced. Editor: Agreed. It challenges our conventional understanding, the boundaries between commodity fetish and genuine artistry; also where the production process sits in the racial division of labor. Curator: Definitely, and I’d offer the observation that these flattened, simplified forms—though abstract—hint at recognizable shapes; suggesting abstracted birds perhaps; forms of identity reshaped and constrained. Editor: In these planes of colour that echo the politics of abstraction, we understand something so much deeper. The very forms he chose and his refusal to work “with the grain.” Curator: This engagement—with flatness, industrial materials, the sheer manual effort needed to produce its appearance of smoothness… all compel. Editor: Indeed. Hume gives us not just a surface but a critical landscape.