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HUNT SLONEM

New York, New York

HUNT SLONEM (b. 1951, Kittery Maine) is an American artist known for his neo-expressionist paintings of butterflies, rabbits, and tropical birds. The artist creates exotic forms with expressive and highly textural brushstrokes that are full of intense color. His compositions often consist of flat spaces with simple forms pushed to the front of the picture plane. His work tends to embrace the ephemeral beauty of nature, a characteristic that brings a nurturing, spiritual effect to his painting suggesting metamorphosis, repose, and a sensation of touching the illimitable. In addition, Slonem works with installations, sculpture, and the restoration of historic spaces, often pairing his paintings with collected objects and various materials to create colorfully monumental environments that are widely noted for their otherworldliness.

Since 1977, Hunt Slonem has had more than 350 exhibitions at prestigious galleries and museums internationally. His work is exhibited globally, in cities including Madras, Quito, Venice, Gustavia, San Juan, Guatemala City, Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid, Stockholm, Oslo, Cologne, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Slonem’s work is in over eighty museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary art in Kansas City. He is highly collected by artists and celebrities alike including Yoko Ono, Jimmy Fallon, Sharon Stone, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Anne Hathaway, and Cameron Diaz, among others.

Described by poet and art critic John Ashberry as “dazzling explosions of the variable life around us that need only to be looked at in order to spring into being,” Slonem’s natural subjects function as a vocabulary of another dimension within our interior world. Influenced by his interest in the mystic and his meditative practice, his figures are realized with a repetition that operates as a form mantra, giving way to a surprisingly playful exuberance on canvas. According to Henry Geldzahler, late Curator for 20th Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “he particularly admires the work of Malcolm Morely, Francesco Clemente, and Roberto Juarez, all exoticists whose works convey a spiritual aura. Lest we leave the impression, belied by the paintings that Slonem is all depth and piety, we should note that there is a remarkable levity in his work, a lightness of being.”