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White Cube’s galleries are closed for the holidays and will reopen on 7 January 2025.

Gary Hume

Liberty Grip

6 March – 21 April 2013

Dates

6 March – 21 April 2013

Location

White Cube Bermondsey

144 – 152 Bermondsey Street
London SE1 3TQ

For each of the three discrete sections of Liberty Grip, Hume used as a template the arm of a mannequin, enlarging this mass-produced, utilitarian object to a colossal scale. Hume then positioned the three arms into an evocative group of forms that suggests both a bundle of limbs or a contorted hand. Bronze on this scale usually commemorates the feat of a war hero or the triumphs of a nation, but with Liberty Grip Hume toys with our conventional uses of monumental sculpture, treating it with mischievous sense of scale, even painting the tips of the abruptly cut-off limbs a playful, intimate colour. Liberty Grip brings to mind the detached and colossal hand of the Roman Emperor Constantine, yet where that sculpture, now in fragments, celebrated the feats of a leader, Hume swaps bravado for all the sensuality and wit that characterise his paintings.

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