Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Richard Hunt
American; 20th-century, 21st-century
Springfield, IL: Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum
75%
Glider. 1966. Welded aluminum
Hunt's art's heyday was the sixties, after he'd moved on from the wrought surfaces and complexities of his youthful phase but before the high-minded prettiness of his long maturity. Glider is a good example of his classical in-between style: compact but not constrained, exuberant but not overextended. The rub with this sculpture is that every one of the movements it makes moves back in on itself; this focuses the piece, directs all its weight inward. Those tendrils coming off that stretched limb do this by reaching back towards their point of origin; the glider-form itself does this with the way its slight cradling curve holds that wedge of scrunched metal — the sculpture's real focal feature — just so. Sure, there's a pompousness at play in Hunt's forms, but he (mostly) gets away with it by subordinating each individual mass to the sense of centeredness which Glider conveys overall. He'd lose the ability to do this sort of subordination later in his career. (2024)