?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
RICHARD HUNT (1935 - ) Untitled (Figure and Bird Composition).
Soldered white metal and wire, circa 1955-1960. Approximately 184 mm; 7 1/4-inches high (not including wooden base).
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; thence by descent to the current owner. The original owner founded and ran the art gallery at the Ravinia Music Festival, north of Chicago, which showed Hunt's work in the late 1950s.
This is one of the earliest sculptures by Hunt to come to auction, made around the time he was studying at the Art Institute of Chicago. Hunt studied the work of sculptors Julio González and David Smith, and used their direct-metal techniques with lead, steel, aluminum, copper, and bronze. In these figurative works, Hunt combined different sculptural methods to create three-dimensionality. According to the Albright Knox Art Gallery, in the 1950s, Hunt made "sculptures with what he called 'steel and space,' referring to natural organic forms such as wings, branches, floral blossoms, torsos, and rocks, as well as characters from Greek mythology." At the Art Institute of Chicago, Hunt made several mythical winged figures and birds, including the welded steel Icarus, 1956, now at the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, before graduating in 1957.
