Richard Hunt: Pressure
Institute of Contemporary Art Miami
Until 29 March 2026
Pressure is the largest survey to date devoted to the American sculptor Richard Hunt (1935-2023) and focuses on his ambitious, material-forward practice between 1955 and 1989. It coincides with a growing interest in the Chicago artist’s singular approach to dimensionality and transcendence; White Cube, which began representing his work a few weeks before his death, staged solo shows of his work in New York (in 2024) and London (last spring).
Hunt taught himself welding while studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the mid-1950s, which allowed him to start creating poetic configurations of found rugged materials. “Richard was making clay figurines at age 14 in the basement of his father’s shop—it was clear early on that he was a major artistic force,” Sukanya Rajaratnam, a director at White Cube, tells The Art Newspaper. She signed the artist a few months after stepping into his studio, where he was storing all the early works that are featured in this show. Rajaratnam recalls: “I could even tell behind the dusty plastic wraps that this was an ‘a-ha’ moment.”
A formative moment for the young artist came when he encountered the welded sculptures of Pablo Picasso and Julio González in the Art Institute of Chicago’s 1953 exhibition Sculpture of the 20th Century. The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) show starts with Telescopic Construction (1955), which Hunt created two years later in an evident attempt to weld the invisible. Hunt created the show’s second-oldest sculpture, Hero’s Head (1956), after attending Emmett Till’s open-casket funeral, which had a transformative impact on the 20-year-old artist. At just under ten inches, the welded steel bust of Till’s disfigured head foreshadowed a practice that developed at the crossroads of the Civil Rights Movement and bold experiments at the boundary between figuration and abstraction.
Beauty and brutality
“Richard made these negotiations between formal innovation and social awareness and he never went literal,” says Gean Moreno, the exhibition’s co-curator (with Alex Gartenfeld) and the director of the ICA’s art and research centre.
A push-and-pull between beauty and brutality anchors Hunt’s nearly seven-decade-long practice. His early interest in mythology is reflected in works in which figures such as Prometheus and Arachne became vessels to express various bodily possibilities and timeless subjects such as truth and fear. “The violence in these myths was less upsetting for Richard than those he witnessed in real life,” Rajaratnam says. He achieved contorted gestures and horrified expressions by distorting his materials, but always managed to infuse his sculptures with a kinetic pulse. Linear Sequence and Linear Peregrination (both 1962), for example, radiate a sharp sense of movement through their bestial forms and the steel’s industrial electricity.
A similar sense of ascension will extend to Hunt’s birthplace with the opening of the Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago next year, where the artist’s specially commissioned bronze sculpture Book Bird will be located outside a new branch of the Chicago Public Library. For Louise Bernard, the founding director of the Museum of the Obama Presidential Center, Hunt was a “definite choice” for the site. “Richard had a librarian mother and sister who both worked within the Chicago public library network,” Bernard says, “and his work had a great awareness for the history of the Great Migration and its historical figures, as well as industrial materials.”
