LONDON.- White Cube announces ‘The Indifferent Owl’, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Gary Hume. Over the past twenty years, Hume has developed a distinctive visual language of bold, simplified forms to create paintings that engage the viewer with their pleasantly irresolvable quality. The exhibition, his first in London for over four years, brings together a large and varied body of new work that will occupy both the Hoxton Square and Mason’s Yard galleries. A painting by Gary Hume is a dynamically ambiguous visual experience. Although each work usually features a recognizable motif – such as a bird or flower – they are often flattened and fractured, and positioned awkwardly in a pictorial space that is brought to life through broad passages of colour that could be repellently acrid or seductively luscious. Negative and positive spaces fluctuate within a painting, stretching figuration to the point that lines, forms and colours start to lose their denotative function. ‘Neither literal nor illusionistic,’ writes Jennifer Higgie in her catalogue essay, Hume’s paintings ‘draw you into the depths of something you might have initially assumed was all surface.’