HUNTER POTTER: I AIN’T HALFTHE MAN I WANTED TO BE

© Hunter Potter

PUBLIC Gallery is presenting I Ain’t Half The Man I Wanted To Be, the debut UK solo exhibition of New York-based artist Hunter Potter. Revolving around his personal meditation on the expectations of masculinity, Potter examines real and imagined outcomes of his own life given a different set of choices and decisions.

Heavily exaggerated and often fantastical, Potter’s paintings pay homage to the various people and lifestyles observed and experienced throughout his upbringing. The work seems to respond to, as well as question, Potter’s own potential role and position within the romantic small-town, blue-collar, Americana environment.

Throughout this new series, Potter mines his own memories and nostalgia to examine, quite simply, the man that he could have, and perhaps wishes he had become. Often presented through symbolic Wild West metaphors, the paintings are both idealised and self-critical. These hyper-masculine characters clad in flannel, cowboy boots and prison stripes, work to question the very expectation of what it means to be a ‘real’ American man in the 21st century.

Using repetitive, familiar and metaphoric imagery, the paintings place Potter’s own life experiences within the wider arena of Americana folklore; stories that are neither past or present, fact or fiction, right or wrong, but more so a recognisable combination of it all.

© Hunter Potter

Hunter Potter (b.1990, Syracuse, New York) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from the University of Vermont in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include Happy To Be Here, Deli Grocery New York; Brooklyn, New York (2019) and It’s a New Life For Me, ChaShaMa Port Authority, New York (2019). Potter was selected for a residency at PLOP, London and in 2018 was awarded the Roger Smith Artist Fellowship, undertaking residencies at the Vermont Studio Centre, Johnson VT and the Golden Foundation, New Berlin, New York.