Untitled (Portrait of Zoe)

"Often, Hume's portraits are reduced to an instantaneous look or glance - he freezes that sudden apprehension of a pair of eyes, hair, that blob on a stalk for a head on a neck. Hume's portraits are often about such fleeting moments of recognition, yet the more one looks the more complex these paintings become. They are portraits painted in the subject's absence, representing not so much the person as the space that their body would occupy, the trace of a portrait, a barely fleshed-out shadow." (A. Searle, in: 'Gary Hume. British Pavilion. XLVIII Venice Biennale', London 1999, p.18.)