Hunt Slonem
Inspired by nature and his 60 pet birds, Hunt Slonem is renowned for his distinct neo-expressionist style. He is best known for his series of bunnies, butterflies and tropical birds, as well as his large-scale sculptures and restorations of forgotten historic homes. 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.
Since his first solo show at the Fischbach Gallery in 1977, Slonem’s work has been showcased internationally hundreds of times, most recently at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. In 2017 and 2018, he will be featured by the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the National Gallery in Bulgaria, and in countless galleries across the United States, Germany and Dubai.
His flair and admiration for far-flung destinations has been a staple of his life since childhood. Slonem was born in 1951 in Kittery, Maine, and his father’s position as a Navy officer meant the family moved often during Hunt’s formative years, including extended stays in Hawaii, California and Connecticut. He would continue to seek out travel opportunities throughout his young-adult years, studying abroad in Nicaragua and Mexico; these eye-opening experiences imbued him with an appreciation for tropical landscapes that would influence his unique style.
After graduating with a degree in painting and art history from Tulane University in New Orleans, Slonem spent several years in the early 1970s living in Manhattan. It wasn’t until Janet Fish offered him her studio for the summer of 1975 that Slonem was able to fully immerse himself in his work. His pieces began getting exhibited around New York, propelling his reputation and thrusting him into the city’s explosive contemporary arts scene. He received several prestigious grants, including from Montreal’s Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cultural Counsel Foundation’s Artist Project, for which he painted an 80-foot mural of the World Trade Center in the late 1970s. He also received an introduction to the Marlborough Gallery, which would represent him for 18 years.
As Slonem honed his aesthetic, his work began appearing in unique, contextual spaces. By 1995 he finished a massive six-by-86-foot mural of birds, which shoots across the walls of the Bryant Park Grill Restaurant in New York City. His charity work has resulted dozens of partnerships, including a wallpaper of his famous bunnies designed specifically with Lee Jofa for the Ronald McDonald House in Long Island.
Hunt Slonem tends to embrace the ephemeral beauty of nature, a characteristic that brings a nurturing, spiritual effect to his creations. Throughout his extensive career as a New York artist, Slonem has favored the subject of exotic birds, rabbits, and butterflies. Lately, his compositions have consisted of flat spaces with simple forms pushed to the front of the picture plane. The artist creates exotic forms with expressive and highly textural brushstrokes that are full of intense color, loosely inspired by artists of the German Expressionism movement such as Ernst Ludwig and Emil Nolde. Henry Geldzahler, a scholar of Hunt Slonem, notes that of contemporary artists, “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.”
Slonem has always had a strong connection to the subjects he represents in his work. As a child, Slonem first felt a connection to birds while living in Hawaii, which deepened further during his time in Central America where he was inspired by the people’s devotion and spiritual fervor. The fascination continued into adulthood; not only does he admire the colorful animals from afar, but he also collects the exotic birds, which reside with him in his New York studio. The lush studio is a sanctuary for the animals and the artist. His constant companions flitter and chat around him all day helping Slonem to capture his immediate surroundings with rhythm and style. The poet and art critic John Ashbery describes Slonem’s depiction of these ephemeral creatures as, “dazzling explosions of the variable life around us that need only to be looked at in order to spring into being.” Slonem creates beautiful, surprising scenes that offer a calming joy to those who encounter it.
Additionally, the mythological aspects that birds and other animals can symbolize inspire Slonem’s art. Slonem has extensively traveled the globe making him keenly aware of biodiversity and appreciative of cultural differences. In older bodies of work, references to spiritually charged objects are much more apparent and literal. For example, Slonem favored depicting Catholic and Hindu saints surrounding animals early on. However, in his most recent series, the saints have been removed, and all spiritual references reside in the exquisiteness of the animals alone. Their simplistic figures fill the entirety of Slonem’s compositions. Whether the canvas consists of a single figure of a bunny or echoes the form dozens of times, the viewer is suddenly confronted with the simplistic beauty of the animal. Henry Geldzahler wrote on the effect of experiencing Hunt Slonem’s canvases as an “esthetic of ocular activity; the viewer’s eye is set in almost constant motion, flicking about to take in the entire rectangle.
[The animals] are rarely in sharp focus; their shapes are somewhat misted and often, repeated so as to create a pattern which itself must be uncoded.” For a moment, the beauty of pure form is the only thing the viewer absorbs, slowly Slonem’s creatures come into focus in full exotic, vibrant force. Slonem continues his tradition of utilizing the intense colors of the neo-expressional style that mirrors the interesting worlds in which these animals exist. He describes his work with one word, “Exotica.” Through spontaneous creative acts, Slonem eulogizes the life of animals. While his subjects have remained consistent over the last decade, Slonem continues to use new techniques to create joy and surprise for the viewer.