RICHARD HUNT: METAMORPHOSIS – A RETROSPECTIVE
White Cube is pleased to present ‘Richard Hunt: Metamorphosis – A Retrospective’, the first posthumous retrospective and the first major European exhibition dedicated to the late American sculptor Richard Hunt.
April 25 – June 29, 2025
Spanning more than six decades, the exhibition traces the evolution of Hunt’s prolific career through over 30 major works, created between 1955 and his passing in 2023. Working predominantly in metal, Hunt developed a sculptural language that was both deeply personal and richly associative, drawing on a broad array of influences: the forms and rhythms of the natural world; the mythic narratives of Greek and Roman antiquity; his cultural heritage and global travels; the formal vocabulary of European modernism and the legacy of African American civil rights leaders who shaped his time. Through sustained experimentation with scale, material, composition and subject, Hunt produced a body of work that continues to shape the evolving discourse of American sculpture.
Born in Chicago’s South Side in 1935, Hunt was immersed from an early age in culture, politics and music, often accompanying his mother to the city’s free public museums. In 1953, he received a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he began experimenting with metal after being introduced to the work of Spanish sculptor Julio González in MoMA’s major travelling exhibition, ‘Sculpture of the Twentieth Century’. Here he also encountered the work of other European modernists, including Jean Arp, Constantin Brâncuși, Umberto Boccioni, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Pablo Picasso.
Reflecting on this pivotal moment, Hunt articulated a vision for sculpture that would build upon the formal breakthroughs of modernism, while embracing a mode of making that drew from accumulated histories, lived experience and the possibilities of form. ‘It seems to me’, he wrote in 1957, ‘that the seeds of artistic revolution sown, grown and reaped during the last fifty years should see the rich fruits of their harvest nurture a new art in this wiser half century – an art which need not seek strength in revolt, but in the creative pulse of its makers; an art having sinew and gut, as well as heart and soft flesh.’
Having been vocal and active during the Civil Rights Movement, Hunt’s Reaching Up may also be understood as an assertion of African American presence and becoming – his expression of ‘a step toward an ever more perfect union of space, time and motion that reminds us of the dreams and visions that once fuelled our actions and desires’.