so here it is…
my official review of: Richard Hunt at David Weinberg Gallery
Chicago
April 17 – May 30, 2009
maybe it’s too late for the show in question…but Richard Hunt is much bigger than any single show…
and his work is timeless…
Richard Hunt’s public work is ubiquitous enough around Chicago that nearly everyone who lives 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 Hunt’s 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 the 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 gallery space crowded with both well-wishers and his own work was a revelation.
A jungian look at 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 of focusing on the negative – and this is one of Richard Hunt’s enduring and most remarkable strengths – 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 Third 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 Fourth, 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.
kristo
