My Guernica

'My Guernica' heralded Gary Hume's departure from painting monochromatic 'Door Paintings' in institutionalised and quintessentially non-art colours. The sequence of earlier works, painted in unemphatic colours, seems to suggest that by self-imposing such strict limitations in colour and imagery, little by little, these limitations began to reveal a range of possibilities and unexplored areas. Of these possibilities, colour stands out above all other. The rudimentary geometry of the image provided an opportunity to combine entirely disconnected colours together in the same work. From this point on, the artist's exploitation of the colour chart remained consistent even when he began to paint from images of figures and flowers. The absence of any correspondence between colour and image can be traced back to Andy Warhol and his screen-print techniques and Gerhard Richter's colour chart paintings.