RICHARD HUNT: EARLY MASTERWORKS
White Cube New York announces Early Masterworks, an exhibition bringing together 25 of the artist’s seminal sculptural works created between 1955 and 1969 – a fertile and critical period during which Hunt innovated the material techniques that would remain central to his prolific seven-decade-long career, immortalising him as one of the foremost sculptors of the 20th and 21st centuries.
March 13 – April 13, 2024
In 1953, after receiving a scholarship at the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Hunt encountered the work of Spanish sculptor Jose González, whose metal welding techniques profoundly influenced the young artist, providing him with an innovative means to cultivate growth and renewal through the deft handling of unyielding metal. Utilising materials salvaged from alleys and local scrapyards in Chicago, Hunt began to apply his sculptural practice to reconciling the natural and the industrial, employing his self-taught welding technique to create fluid, organic forms suggestive of biomorphic growth.
These early masterworks are distinguished by characteristics located within distinct series, which equally overlap, build upon and engage in a dialogue with other works – from those rooted in classical and mythological themes and early 20th century Primitivism, to expressions of linear-spatial expansion, moving into the latter half of the 1960s towards more monolithic and enclosed forms, as exemplified by Figure Form (1966) and Stretch (1969).
Through the allegorical narratives of mythology – of indiscriminate punishment and metamorphic transformation – Hunt found a way to reconcile the darker realities of contemporary America. In his later career, Hunt reflected, ‘My own use of winged forms in the early ’50s is based on mythological themes, like Icarus and Winged Victory. It’s about, on one hand trying to achieve victory or freedom internally. It’s also about investigating ideas of personal and collective freedom. My use of forms has roots and resonances in the African-American experience and is also a universal symbol.’
Hunt’s lifelong interest in mythology finds further expression in Linear Peregrination (1962), an expansive, open-form steelwork belonging to the artist’s ‘Metamorphosis’ series. Inscribing space through a meandering trinity of points, the sculpture’s chromed armature assumes the abstracted shape of a bovine, drawing dual inspiration from Picasso’s 1942 found-object sculpture, Bull’s Head, while referencing the Greek myth of Europa and the Bull.
In the mid-1960s, Hunt began to explore more homogenised, enclosed forms, moving away from the calligraphic style of the linear-spatial sculptures. Produced within this transitional period, Opposed Forms (1965) embodies composite conditions, in which rounded, organic shapes cohere with constellations of axial geometry. A chrome-patinated bodily mass rests upon three attenuated legs of wrought steel, evoking a life form that appears almost otherworldly.
Exploring the possibilities of diverse metals, including copper and aluminium, as observed in Coil (1965) and Tube Form (1966), as well as techniques of casting, showcased in Serpentine (1969) – one of the first works the artist cast in America – Hunt’s progression into the 1970s laid the foundations for his later large-scale public installations. From his formative student years at the SAIC to the monumental, commissioned works exhibited in institutions across the United States, Hunt’s protean experimentations in scale, material, composition and subject matter collectively form the epic odyssey of an inimitable sculptor.