Gary Hume’s art is distinguished by luscious surfaces and simplified forms. He is a painter and sculptor known for his use of glossy, industrial paint. While there are other colorfully painted sculptures in the Pappajohn Sculpture Park, the shiny smoothness of these two works makes them quite unlike any of their neighbors. The reductive shapes with uniform, uninterrupted surfaces characteristic of the artist exist in a visual space between the everyday familiar and the compositionally abstract. The works are snowmen, as the title tells us, and for many viewers, will carry the sense of nostalgia and play that term implies. Without the title, however, these could just as easily be purely formal abstractions, one set of snowy white orbs juxtaposed with a black version of the same. 

The artist’s Snowman works began in 1996, when Hume made a real snowman in England’s Peak District and dyed it with food coloring (a structure long gone but immortalized in photographs). Paintings of the simple figure came soon after. In the intervening years, he created other sculptural versions in various materials in blue, pink, green, chrome, polished bronze, and even reimagined as jewelry. Ironic humor is found in much of Hume’s art, and it is very much present in the Snowman sculptures. Many of his other sculptures also carry the title Back of Snowman. The title plays a clever joke on the viewer as no amount of circling will reveal the snowman’s other side. Hume claims to have been inspired by an art historical anecdote about the Renaissance master Michelangelo being commissioned to make a snow sculpture in 1494 by a member of the Medici family, his powerful patrons. The young artist took the assignment to heart and made a beautiful, heroic snowman that may have been a practice run for the famous David he would make years later. Like all snowmen, this lost masterpiece melted away. Not all of us are Michelangelo, but the building of a snowman is often a child’s first attempt at sculpture. This inspiration plays a role in Hume’s work, a further example of his ability to combine simplicity and playfulness with thoughtful takes on history, materials, and composition.