Richard Hunt

In the pantheon of 20th-century sculptors, Richard Hunt stood as one of the preeminent masters. Working predominantly in metal, the artist employed an alchemist’s touch to shape, cut, weld or cast his various materials, into sculptures whose fluid, biomorphic forms emerge as if pulled directly from nature. Hunt’s hybrid creations are characterised by a reconciliation and harmonisation of the vital tensions that exist between dualities – the natural and the industrial, the surreal and the abstract, the geometric and the organic. At the core of Hunt’s artistic and philosophical approach was a fundamental concern with freedom; of political and artistic freedom, as well as personal and universal freedom: ‘I am interested more than anything else in being a free person. To me, that means that I can make what I want to make, regardless of what anyone else thinks I should make.’