Hunt Slonem

Art Brokerage: Park West Artist: Hunt Slonem American Artist: b. 1951. Hunt Slonem (born Hunt Slonim, July 18, 1951) is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker. He is best known for his Neo-Expressionist paintings of tropical birds, often based on a personal aviary in which he has been keeping from 30 to over 100 live birds of various species. Slonem's works are included in many important museum collections all over the world; he is exhibiting regularly at both public and private venues, and he has received numerous honors and awards. Slonem's obsessive and repetitive rendering of his subjects reflects his desire to explore issues of spatial complexity, compression and density in what the acclaimed Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler deemed "a consistent investigation of post-cubist abstraction." The repetitive imagery also makes a reference to Andy Warhol. "I was influenced by Warhol's repetition of soup cans and Marilyn," says Slonem. "But I'm more interested in doing it in the sense of prayer, with repetition... It's really a form of worship." He is not interested in realism or, unlike Warhol, in advertising or media, and his paintings are neither narrative nor specific in detail. Rather, Slonem's work is deeply rooted in the act of painting. His jarring color choices, spontaneous mark making, and scratched hatch marks are the result of his ongoing fascination with the manipulation and implementation of paint. For Slonem, cross-hatching has "a feeling of a tapestry, it's like weaving. I'm making colors bleed into each other, I'm revealing the under-painting. I'm making these marks to allow the light to come through, basically. So you're seeing about five levels of paint, instead of one." It is this kind of devotion to the process of painting that prompted Henry Geldzahler to observe in 1993 that "Slonem is a painter, a painter's painter with an enormous bag of technical tricks which become apparent to the viewer the longer he stands before the work." Another recurring theme of Slonem's pictorial work is portrait painting, and that of Abraham Lincoln in particular. He is interested in history and memorabilia, and for him, the "larger-than-life" Lincoln is a catchall. In Slonem's words, "On Marilyn [Monroe]'s desk, she had a picture of her mother and a picture of Lincoln. And she said, 'I really didn't know who my father was, so it might as well be Abraham Lincoln.'" According to the Interview Magazine, "Slonem's portraits of Lincoln feel personal, and in surprising ways, he's close to the long-deceased." "I work with diviners and mystics, and one of them started channeling Lincoln in my house," says Slonem. "[Lincoln] guided me to paint certain things, like my doves: he wanted me to paint them as a symbol of freedom." Listings wanted.