Whitechapel Auction

We were asked by the Whitechapel Art Gallery London, to contribute an artwork to a charity auction, to raise funds for their public programme.

Each invited artist was supplied with water colour paper, paints and brushes.

We decided to make an artwork that would be very, very desirable to future owners and collectors. Therefore we meticulously copied reproductions, of two Gary Hume paintings from the catalogue of the extremely popular Whitechapel exhibition in 2000; his Angel, series.

The imagery is based on the artist's photographs of enormous concrete angels on the ceiling of the Catholic Cathedral in Brasilia. Following his usual practice, he enlarged and traced the imagery in order to generate the outlines that structure his sumptuous, sexy abstracted paintings of flat, gloss, and high-key colour. We reversed the process, sort of, by tracing photographic reproduction of the paintings and making watercolour equivalents.

The paintings are beautiful, they look like Gary Hume's, and most visitors thought they were Gary Hume's. They did extremely well for the Whitechapel at auction..........

One was bought by a collector and later given to the retiring director of the Whitechapel, Catherine Lampert as a gift; the other was hastily purchased by Gary Hume's gallerist, Jay Joplin of White Cube, to keep the painting out of the market-place.

artists who kindly donated work to A Bigger Splash include; Fiona Banner, David Batchelor, Sonia Boyce, Tony Bevan, Ian Davenport, Peter Doig, Tracey Emin, Mark Francis, Anya Gallaccio, Cathy de Monchaux, Paul Morrison, Paul Noble, Chris Ofili, Julian Opie, Grayson Perry, Bob & Roberta Smith, Wolfgang Tillmans, Shafique Uddin, Jessica Voorsanger, Rachel Whiteread, Alison Wilding, and Paul Winstanley.