If this makes him sound like some Nabokovian pervert obsessed with young Lolitas flashing their thighs, it is worth remembering that Willem de Kooning was just as taken with these twirling, gesticulating nymphs in their parades of ritualised motion. And that is precisely what these sacrificial lambs – prizes for returning warriors, the artist calls them – have become in Hume’s latest paintings, displayed in American Tan, at London’s White Cube MAson’s YArd.
Balletic, athletic, slender limbs outflung, cartwheeling, jack-knifing, landing in splits, these are bodies put through extraordinary contortions. Caught in freeze-frame, they scarcely look like nubile teenagers at all. They are, in short, ideal subject matter for this painter of radically denatured images.
more from The Observer Review here.