GARY HUME | Carnival Snowman

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
Private Collection, New York
Christie's, New York, 16 May 2013, Lot 452
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is lighter and brighter in the original and it fails to fully convey the work's iridescent qualities. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals some very faint scratches in places and a few tiny losses to the underside.
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Delectably kitsch, Carnival Snowman exhibits one of the most important motifs in Gary Hume’s oeuvre. First appearing in 1996 in a painting of two perfect coloured circles (Snowman, 1996), the symbol of the snowman engenders a formal tension at its most acute when embodied in sculpture. The durability and strength of bronze contrasts with the essential transience and precariousness of the represented object. Hume plays with our perception: initially appearing alien and inscrutable, the sculpture becomes irremediably a snowman upon reading its title. Then, as viewing continues, the Jasper Johns effect is unmistakable. Through the identification of the representing and represented objects, we are reminded of the status of anything as both collection of forms and symbol in a network.

Sleek and collectable, the sculpture implies commentary on the propensity of mass culture to commodify moments once considered necessarily singular. Just as glossy consumer goods reflect their consumers by being both cause and effect of their identities, the viewer can see themselves in the glistening sheen of the present work. Questions of when surface becomes substance, appearance becomes reality, and summary becomes facts emanate from these knowing, eye-like orbs. And yet the playful orange bonnet on top of the ‘head’ collapses these concepts and returns the work, once more, to a minimalist arrangement. We are thus invited by Hume to partake in a playful carnival. The work is both celebration and critique, at once loaded with meaning, and nothing beyond itself.  

In 1997, Hume and his friend the artist Don Brown coloured snowmen with food dye and photographed them. This was the first act of three-dimensional experimentation carried out by Hume with snowmen. On one level, Carnival Snowman is in the Jeff Koons tradition: its power deriving from the paradoxical way in which it both lacks signification, and by imitation, signifies the meaningless products of mass culture around us. And yet it could also be read as an oblique reference to Michelangelo, who, following the death of his benefactor Lorenzo the Magnificent, was commissioned by Lorenzo’s son to build a snowman as a mimetic elegy for the fleetingness of existence. The combination of earnest intellectuality and a basic glee in the object is one of the hallmarks of Hume’s aesthetic. The work oscillates between these planes, confounding and delighting in equal measure.