Richard Hunt USA, b. 1935
Tubing Form, 1966
Aluminum
36 x 44 x 40 in
91.4 x 111.8 x 101.6 cm
91.4 x 111.8 x 101.6 cm
6555
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As a young artist living and working near the infamous steel yards on the South Side of Chicago, Richard Hunt perceived a Surrealist dream-world lurking in the junkyards of Midwestern...
As a young artist living and working near the infamous steel yards on the South Side of Chicago, Richard Hunt perceived a Surrealist dream-world lurking in the junkyards of Midwestern America. The scrapped metal skeletons of the Steel Age, corroding in heaps across the Rust Belt, became lifelike abstractions in his hands, expressing the beauty and terror of a rapidly changing American Dream.
A seemingly living entity—part energy and part matter—struggles to free itself from Hunt’s 1966 masterpiece Tubing Form. An elegant expression of Hunt’s lifelong exploration of the synthesis of nature and the built world, this sculpture demonstrates the ability of everyday materials and abstract forms to convey the complexities of the modern human condition.
In an exhibition essay first published in the early 1960s, the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco wrote about a trend he was then witnessing in contemporary art, in which “form, art, and beauty were no longer something immobile, waiting to be seen, but something in the process of ‘becoming’ while we watched it.” Eco’s poetic synopsis could not be more apt to describe this and the other reclaimed metal sculptures Hunt was then making, a world away on the South Side of Chicago.
A seemingly living entity—part energy and part matter—struggles to free itself from Hunt’s 1966 masterpiece Tubing Form. An elegant expression of Hunt’s lifelong exploration of the synthesis of nature and the built world, this sculpture demonstrates the ability of everyday materials and abstract forms to convey the complexities of the modern human condition.
In an exhibition essay first published in the early 1960s, the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco wrote about a trend he was then witnessing in contemporary art, in which “form, art, and beauty were no longer something immobile, waiting to be seen, but something in the process of ‘becoming’ while we watched it.” Eco’s poetic synopsis could not be more apt to describe this and the other reclaimed metal sculptures Hunt was then making, a world away on the South Side of Chicago.
Provenance
Artist Studio, ChicagoKavi Gupta, Chicago
Exhibitions
AFRICOBRA 50, Kavi Gupta Gallery, 2018Frieze Masters, London, UK, 2019