so here it is...
April 17 – May 30, 2009
Richard Hunt’s public work is
ubiquitous enough in Chicago that nearly everyone here can get intimate with at
least one piece from his extraordinary oeuvre.
My opportunity began in 1992
after a show at the now defunct Terra Museum…a show in which I was enthralled
not simply by his expertise with metal and abstraction…but by the integrity of
his metaphors….
And because of that show I
became interested in and intimate with a 3 part work by Hunt dedicated to John
Peter Altgeld (an Illinois Governor whose fame is apparently of the positive
variety)…and located nearly a stone’s throw from his DePaul neighborhood atelier.
I’ll leave the story of my Richard
Hunt / Caspar David Friedrich night for another time…but knowing that every experience
of Hunt’s sculpture can be a potential encounter with the sublime…I was drawn
to opening night of his recent show at David Weinberg in Chicago, like a moth
to the flame.
Now a gallery opening is neither
the place nor time to study an artist’s work…but watching the calm, affable,
unassuming figure of Richard Hunt move within the crowd of both well-wishers
and his own work was a revelation.
Richard Hunt’s sculpture
generally reveals 3 basic metaphors…
One is what I call the Bridge. A
sense of iron / steel bridgework that most often speaks of Integration…in the
best sense of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s work.
In this show, it was most
vividly represented by the non-organic forms of a 1974 Untitled lithograph.
Forms that supported organic, vine forms or plants…not in decay, like Roman
ruins…but much more contemporary, and optimistic…almost prescient…relating to
the changes vis à vis our country’s new presidency.
Two is what I call Oppression /
Compression. Organic curves and sweeps, buds and branches that reveal the
strength and vigor of new growth. A natural vitality manifesting despite the
ruthless pruning or heavy handed restrictions of Discrimination.
Hybrid Totem, a 2007 bronze
piece readily demonstrates this metaphor as something of an abstract, pruned
grapevine. A form whose emphasis is not as much on the forces that shaped it…as
it is on the simple vigor and exuberant life it manifests. Comparing this piece
with a 1980 color screenprint entitled Purple…one can see that even back
then…before the work of the Bridge metaphor had come to today’s fruition…there
was good wine being made from these grapes. And it’s as if the artist was a
visionary predicting today’s change.
But instead this is one of
Richard Hunt’s enduring and most remarkable strengths…. that there is no
bitterness in his Compressive metaphor. There is only sober strength, calm growth
and optimism, and even a bit of giddy celebration.
The 3rd metaphor,
Flight, is the one most easy to observe. A nuanced example is Sculptured Place
II. A whimsical bronze combination of mosque, cathedral, and Gehry opera house
paradoxically sitting in the luscious forms of some beautiful liquid mud flat.
As if the religious spirit in man requires just such rich alchemical depth in
order to achieve the great heights Hunt apparently knows and trusts.
Richard Hunt doesn’t create
meaningless abstraction….
And he doesn’t pose emasculated,
intellectual conundrums for only cognoscenti to enjoy…
He surprises and delights.
And in this show I was surprised
by what I sense to be a 4th, new metaphor. One that could be called
Play. A mixture of heavy, compressive, yet fluid forms with an immersion into
depth.
It seems apparent in a
startlingly different 2008 piece called Posiedon…with the form of a whale’s
tail diving beneath some common oceanic threshold. And then seems confirmed in
the 2001 piece Low Flight…with forms and rivets suggestive of an aircraft
wing…yet possessing that same curious tail indicative of playful energy
immersed in this compressed and concentrated form.
Among numerous delights were wonderful (and surprising) Self-Portraits…most notably perhaps was Incline With Rising Curve. An elegant homage to Julio Gonzalez with a cheeky reference to Chicago’s own Picasso…and saying here, as with each of the Self-Portraits…Twisted Fiddler, Legeresque, Harlequin, and Form in Evolution...I stand not alone, but on the shoulders of giants.
Well…there’s a new giant for the
rest of us, and he lives (and works) in the City of Broad Shoulders.
