Gary Hume is renowned for paintings distinguished by a bright palette, reduced imagery and flat areas of seductive colour. While Hume's paintings have always emphasised their luscious surfaces and simplified forms, many are infused with a melancholic beauty.

Hume first received critical acclaim with a body of work known as the 'Door' paintings. These minimal and abstract works, with their high gloss paint and insistent reflective surfaces, developed in the early 1990s into a broader set of motifs, such as the nude, the portrait, the garden, as well as a pictorial idiom drawn from childhood, with images of polar bears, snowmen, rabbits, owls and close-up faces.

His subject matter broadened yet more through the mid 1990s ...