Artwork Description
Hunt Slonem – Purple Heart
Dimensions: 19 x 19″ framed / 14 x 14″ finished size
Year: 2022
Medium: oil and acrylic w/diamond dust on wood
Hunt Slonem is an internationally recognized American painter, sculptor, and printmaker. His work has been exhibited in more than 350 galleries and museums worldwide, and is represented in over 100 museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City. He exhibits regularly at both public and private venues around the world, and has received numerous honors and awards, including a MacDowell Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts grant. He lives in New York City and Louisiana, where he has notably restored two important plantations to their original states.
Inspired by nature and his sixty pet birds, Hunt is best known for his distinct Neo-Expressionist oil paintings of bunnies, butterflies, and the tropical birds in his personal aviary. His lavishly colored canvases are populated with birds rendered with thick brushstrokes. “I was influenced by Warhol’s repetition of soup cans and Marilyn,” Slonem says. “But I’m more interested in doing it in the sense of prayer, with repetition… It’s really a form of worship.” According to The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, “This witty Formalist strategy meshes the creatures into the picture plane and sometimes nearly obliterates them as images, but it also suspends and shrouds them in a dim, atmospheric light that is quite beautiful.” Hunt Slonem tends to embrace the ephemeral beauty of nature, a characteristic that brings a nurturing, spiritual effect to his creations.
Slonem’s works can be found in the permanent collections of 250 museums around the world, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Whitney, the Miro Foundation and the New Orleans Museum of Art.