Up and out Spiral by Richard Hunt is an exceptional example of Hunt’s distinctively organic visual language. Made from cast and welded bronze, the form seems to be alive, as if morphing or growing, extending itself into space. The metal seems to transcend its rigid qualities, becoming instead something fluid and elegant. Though abstract, the work is suggestive of forces such as wind, waves, and flares of light. About sculptures such as this, Hunt says, “They express natural tendencies.”

Born near the infamous steel yards on the South Side of Chicago in 1935, Hunt was delivered into a world of metal. As a young artist studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s, he perceived a Surrealist dreamworld lurking in the junkyards of Midwestern America. The cast-off, metal skeletons of the Steel Age—even then beginning to corrode in heaps across the rust belt—became lifelike abstractions in his hands, perfectly expressing the beauty and terror of a rapidly changing, mid-20th Century American Dream.

By the time Hunt graduated from SAIC in 1957, his work had already been exhibited by MoMA, a testament to his strikingly personal language of lyrical abstraction, mature beyond his years. Though he was comfortable working with a range of materials, including found objects, wood and steel, a fellowship that allowed him to travel through reconstructed Europe in 1958 convinced him that metal epitomized the spirit of the Modern World.

Following his landmark solo retrospective at MoMA in 1971, titled The Sculpture of Richard Hunt, the artist embarked on what he would eventually call his “second career” as a public artist. His public sculptures embodied Hunt’s interest in attaining “a synthesis of organic and industrial subject matter.” He never stopped making smaller scale works, however. In his smaller works we can plainly see the emergence of the visual language that informs his larger sculptures.