Dimensions: support, each: 2823 x 1326 mm
Copyright: © Gary Hume | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: Standing before us, we have Gary Hume's "Red Barn Door." It's part of the Tate collection, a monumental piece—each support measures nearly three meters high! Editor: My first thought? It’s a gorgeous, arresting flatness. The way the red just sits there, unapologetically. It's like a Rothko, but, well, a door. Curator: Hume’s work often plays with everyday imagery, simplifying it to almost graphic forms. He uses high-gloss industrial paint, which gives it a sleek, almost artificial quality. Editor: Right, the industrial paint is key. It rejects the rustic charm we might expect from such a subject. It's not about romanticizing rural life, but maybe about questioning our ideas of authenticity. Curator: Exactly! Think about the semiotics of the barn door, the rural idyll, then completely deconstruct it. It’s more conceptual than sentimental. Editor: For me, the scale and that unwavering red force a confrontation. It’s a barrier, a statement, and dare I say, a little bit confrontational in its simplicity. Curator: So much from just a door, right? It’s about seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary, and the questions that can unlock. Editor: Absolutely. It leaves me pondering the spaces we create, both physical and metaphorical, and what they truly mean.
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Red Barn Door is a large-scale painting on two abutting aluminium panels. From a distance, because of the glossy paint used by Hume, the painting has the appearance of a reflective red monochrome surface. On moving closer, an image of a pair of wooden barn doors becomes apparent. The ‘z’ shape wooden framework of the doors is raised (a result of Hume’s ‘drawing’ their outlines using a form of silicon paste), whereas the planks of wood are delineated by a thin line of gold-coloured paint or ink. In such slight modulations of the chosen image, this painting returns to the series of ‘Door Paintings’ made by Hume between 1988 and 1991, such as Incubus 1991 (Tate T07184). These paintings of institutional doors, initially based on hospital doors, were both impersonal and democratic in their approach and subject. Red Barn Door, however, is also rather different; here the anonymous, functional and modern aspect of his earlier paintings is replaced by a pair of doors that are homely, reflective of a rural location and to some extent even exotic. Red Barn Door was painted in Hume’s house and studio in upstate New York, a place he tends to visit annually each summer, and continues the strand of ‘transatlantic romance’ that the art historian David Anfam identified in Hume’s series of paintings and sculptures exhibited in 2007 under the title American Tan (David Anfam, ‘American Beauty’, in American Tan, exhibition catalogue, White Cube, London 2007, p.7). Hume’s solo show at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York in 2009, in which this painting was shown, also included another barn door subject, Blue ’n’ Cream Barn Door 2009.
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