The exhibition with works by Richard Artschwager and Gary Hume marks the first time their work has been brought into dialogue. For this show—the first at the New York gallery for each artist—Hume selected his works in direct response to Artschwager’s.

Artschwager’s punctuation marks and Hume’s silhouettes share an interest in the smallest units of legibility: Exclamation Point (1988), made of bristles on a wooden core, is stripped of its grammatical function and turned into an object that is at once emphatic and purposeless, prompting the viewer to look again at something they thought they already understood. Hume’s Yellow Nude 8 (2015) operates similarly—a shiny yellow surface with a black silhouette, it represents not the body itself but the void between hip and arm, the shape of an absence.

Hume—one of the most important and independent voices among the Young British Artists—is best known for his figurative and abstract paintings on aluminium panels, made with high-gloss household enamel paint, often featuring natural motifs. Exemplary of Hume’s approach are the Doors series, such as The Argument (diptych) (2004) and The Couple (diptych) (2004), which anthropomorphize door forms as a couple in conflict and a pair of lovers, respectively.

Hume’s Three Yellow Horizons and a Green Wood (2013) shifts toward a more distilled, landscape-based vocabulary and particularly exemplifies his engagement with motifs drawn from nature, where bands of color evoke horizon lines and reduce the natural world to a luminous, near-abstract composition.