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Richard Hunt

Learn about one of the foremost American sculptors
of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Ahead of Richard Hunt’s major London retrospective at White Cube Bermondsey this spring, discover the leading sculptor’s life, work and legacy. 

Over a seven decade-long career, Hunt staged more than 170 solo shows and completed over 160 large-scale public sculpture commissions worldwide. Learn about upcoming museum shows, explore archival photography and listen as curators, artists and writers discuss his life and work.

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Upcoming exhibition

Richard Hunt: Metamorphosis – A Retrospective

25 April – 29 June 2025
White Cube Bermondsey

The first London retrospective of work by Richard Hunt (1935–2023) opens at White Cube Bermondsey in April 2025.

Working predominantly in metal, Hunt was profoundly inspired by biological science and the natural world. His hybrid sculptures are characterised by dualities, that of the natural and the industrial, the surreal and the abstract, the geometric and the organic.

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Listen: Artists, Curators and Writers discuss Richard Hunt

On Richard Hunt: An Audio Series

Thelma Golden
Director and Chief Curator, Studio Museum in Harlem

Thelma Golden first discovered Richard Hunt early in her career as an intern at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she now serves as director. She discusses the artist’s support of her work as an African American curator, and his drive to create and innovate with his art.

On Richard Hunt: An Audio Series

LeRonn P. Brooks, PhD
Curator of the African American, Art History Initiative
Modern and Contemporary Collections, Getty Research Institute

Brooks reflects on his first meeting with Richard Hunt, and the cultural and social context in which he created his radical sculpture.

On Richard Hunt: An Audio Series

Kennedy Yanko
Artist

Yanko discusses parallels between her own practice and Richard Hunt’s use of metal, reminiscing on first meeting the artist in 2019.

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Current Museum Exhibitions

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25 October 2024 - 20 April 2025 | Springfield, Illinois

12 October 2024 - 2 March 2025 | Fort Worth, Texas

Richard Hunt grinding at his Cleveland Ave. studio in Chicago, 1962. © 2024 The Richard Hunt Trust / ARS, NY and DACS, London

Hunt standing with Opposed Linear Forms (1961), behind left, and Organic Construction, Number 3 (1961) far right, at B.C. Holland Gallery, Chicago, 1962. © Don Sparks. Graphics Mike Sparks. © 2024 The Richard Hunt Trust / ARS, NY and DACS, London

Richard Hunt seated at Mill Race Studio, San Antonio, beside Longhorn (1959, dismantled 1960). © Martha Mood © 2024 The Richard Hunt Trust / ARS, NY and DACS, London

Artist Biography

Portrait of Richard Hunt. Photo: Sandro Miller

Born in 1935 on the South Side of Chicago, Hunt’s journey as a sculptor began at the age of 15, working initially with clay in a studio he built in his bedroom, later moving to the basement of his father’s barbershop. In the early 1950s, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he encountered the work of Spanish sculptor Julio González in the exhibition ‘Sculpture of the Twentieth Century’. González’s forged, hammered and welded metal sculptures became one of the formative influences on the young artist. Inspired in part by González, Hunt transitioned away from soft materials and devoted himself solely to working with metal, teaching himself to solder, and later weld, discarded metal that he scavenged from local scrapyards in Chicago.

With a profound fascination for biological science and the natural world, Hunt meditated on trajectories of metamorphosis, from basic cell division to more complex evolutions. In the artist’s alloying of mechanical and organic vocabularies, Hunt’s abstract sensuosity acknowledges the inherent, unique possibilities of metal, unrivalled by any other sculptural materials be that clay, stone or wood.

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Publication

Richard Hunt ‘Early Masterworks’

Published following Richard Hunt’s (1935–2023) exhibition of early sculptures at White Cube New York, this catalogue marks the largest presentation of Hunt’s works in New York since his landmark retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971. Featuring sculptures created between 1955 and 1969, this publication showcases the intricacy of Hunt’s metalsmithing techniques and the evolution of his biomorphic forms.

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