The familiar shape of this Snowman stirs the imagination and evokes memories of playing in the snow. Gary Hume often takes recognisable childhood images and reduces them down to pure forms, blurring the line between abstraction and representation. This simple snowman shape is often seen in his paintings and prints, first appearing in 1996.

Hume’s sculptures are made in clay before being cast in bronze. In using this material, his Snowman transforms the temporary and fleeting nature of snow into something permanent and solid. Primarily a painter, Hume initially found it difficult to transition the image into three-dimensions, and so spent time in Yorkshire building snowmen, experimenting with dye and food colouring, and then photographing them. He described these experiments as his “ready-mades”, referring to the name given to using a pre-existing object as a foundation for sculpture.

Snowman, Two Balls Twinkle White (2014) is on loan courtesy of the Private Collection of Tia.