‘Richard Hunt: Metamorphosis – A Retrospective’ marks the first posthumous retrospective and the first major European exhibition dedicated to the late American sculptor Richard Hunt, whose innovative and intuitive command of metal forged a singular presence within the canon of 20th- and 21st-century sculpture. Spanning more than six decades, the exhibition traces the evolution of Hunt’s prolific career through over 30 major works, created between 1955 and his passing in 2023. Working predominantly in metal, Hunt developed a sculptural language that was both deeply personal and richly associative, drawing on a broad array of influences: the forms and rhythms of the natural world; the mythic narratives of Greek and Roman antiquity; his cultural heritage and global travels; the formal vocabulary of European modernism and the legacy of African American civil rights leaders who shaped his time. Through sustained experimentation with scale, material, composition and subject, Hunt produced a body of work that continues to shape the evolving discourse of American sculpture.
Born in Chicago’s South Side in 1935, Hunt was immersed from an early age in culture, politics and music, often accompanying his mother to the city’s free public museums. In 1953, he received a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he began experimenting with metal after being introduced to the work of Spanish sculptor Julio González in MoMA’s major travelling exhibition, ‘Sculpture of the Twentieth Century’. Here he also encountered the work of other European modernists, including Jean Arp, Constantin Brâncuși, Umberto Boccioni, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Pablo Picasso. Reflecting on this pivotal moment, Hunt articulated a vision for sculpture that would build upon the formal breakthroughs of modernism, while embracing a mode of making that drew from accumulated histories, lived experience and the possibilities of form. ‘It seems to me’, he wrote in 1957, ‘that the seeds of artistic revolution sown, grown and reaped during the last fifty years should see the rich fruits of their harvest nurture a new art in this wiser half century – an art which need not seek strength in revolt, but in the creative pulse of its makers; an art having sinew and gut, as well as heart and soft flesh.’1
In the autumn of 1955, at just 19 years old, Hunt was among more than 100,000 mourners who attended the open-casket visitation of Emmett Till – a 14-year-old African American boy whose brutal lynching that summer marked a seismic moment in American history. Hero’s Head (1956), one of Hunt’s earliest mature works, stands as the first among several artistic responses dedicated to Till’s legacy. Modestly scaled to the dimensions of a human head and resting on a stainless-steel plinth, the welded steel sculpture preserves the image of Till’s mutilated face. Composed of scrap metal parts, twisted and welded into a complex hierarchy of depths and reliefs, the work’s varied patination melds planes of dark, mantled steel with dapples of burnished gold.
In its confluence of material and conceptual qualities, Hero’s Head prefigured many of the concerns that would define Hunt’s practice. A selection of major early works in the North Galleries, produced between 1955 and 1966, attests to a vital period of technical innovation and conceptual growth – one that established the vocabulary of his mature practice. In works from the mid-1950s, including Construction N and Construction S (both 1956), Hunt combined metal and wood – a hybrid approach he would soon relinquish in favour of working exclusively with metal. Drawn to the material’s capacity for linearity, malleability and spatial dynamism, the expansive open-form sculptures that emerged from this transition articulate Hunt’s deepening engagement with the expressive potential of line, manifesting as three-dimensional ‘drawings-in-space’. Among these, three works in South Gallery I, Opposed Linear Forms (1961), Linear Peregrination (1962) and Linear Sequence (1962), reflect the artist’s sustained fascination with Greek and Roman mythology, drawing on the narratives of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as conceptual touchstones. Elsewhere, the influence of European modernism asserts itself. The spare, attenuated construction of Alberto Giacometti’s figures finds resonance in Man on a Vehicular Construction (1956), a rare figurative expression rendered in soldered wire, while Untitled (1957) engages the jocular surrealism of Picasso and González’s Woman in the Garden (1929–30). The latter – his largest and most ambitious work to date – earned Hunt a fellowship to travel to Europe, where he undertook training in casting and produced his first works in bronze.
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