Dated 1989, and seemingly part of a larger series, the wall works, all of which are titled “Wall Piece” and numbered, maintain a freshness and humor that suggests a longer, more extensive look is in order. In one piece, with a frame of thick, rusted steel, two small metal sections have been pulled up from the bottom edge to the top of the frame. This tearing-upward of steel forms underscored its weight and resistance, added a note of unexpected lightness and declared that nothing is permanent. In another wall piece, a bar extends and twists diagonally from left to right and top to bottom. For all the flatness of the frame, we have to move around these works to see them. They are, as Lieberman said about his earlier work, “three-dimensional ‘space drawings,’” which gain their power from the fact that Hunt is working within a particular, self-defined constraint: the steel frame from which the linear element must extend into space or reconnect to the base. Starting with this, what kinds of lines or forms can the base generate? In these four pieces Hunt does not repeat himself, doesn’t settle into recognizable moves or a style. He seems to have been influenced by Minimalism and taken it somewhere unexpected.”


In 2016, John Yau wrote about Richard Hunt’s Wall Pieces in an article for Hyperallergic, covering Hunt’s solo exhibiton at the Studio Museum in Harlem. (https://hyperallergic.com/317218/richard-hunt-framed-and-extended-at-the-studio-museum-in-harlem/)

In the article, Yau wrote:
“The exhibition Richard Hunt: Framed and Extended at the Studio Museum in Harlem (July 14 – October 30, 2016) offers a small but tantalizing glimpse of what the museum’s press release calls:
[…] three lesser-known but integral aspects of Hunt’s art —printmaking, small-scale sculpture and wall sculpture—that share a vocabulary with the public commissions and express the same sense of lightness and vitality.

In the wall works, [Hunt] makes a three-dimensional drawing that uses a steel frame measuring less than two feet on a side as its base, from which a linear form extends into the viewer’s space.