Up and out Spiral is an exceptional example of Richard Hunt’s distinctively organic visual language. Made from cast and welded bronze, the form is immutable, and yet it seems to be in motion, morphing or growing, extending itself into space. The work transcends its rigid qualities, becoming 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 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. Following his landmark solo retrospective at MoMA in 1971, Hunt 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.” Yet, he never stopped making smaller scale works, in which we can plainly see the emergence of the visual language that informs so many of his larger, public sculptures.