Hunt Slonem American, b. 1951

Born 1951, Kittery, Maine; lives and works primarily in New York.

Hunt Slonem (b. 1951, Kittery, Maine) is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker. The son of a Navy officer, he spent part of his childhood in Hawaii and later studied in Nicaragua and Mexico. Before completing a degree in painting and art history at Tulane University in 1973, he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 1972, where he encountered visiting artists such as Louise Nevelson, Alex Katz, Alice Neel, Richard Estes, Jack Levine, and Al Held.

Slonem’s imagery draws on direct experience: birds and orchids from childhood in Hawaii, butterflies and tropical life from Nicaragua and Mexico, and a devotional sensibility—including repetition as mantra—later shaped by Eastern religion and travels to India. After moving to New York in 1973, Slonem worked on public art for two years under the Cultural Council Foundation Artists’ Project, painting a large-scale mural at the World Trade Center and saints for churches in Brooklyn. Rabbits first appeared in those paintings at the feet of saints before becoming independent images and, later, grouped walls of small framed panels, now called “Bunny Walls.”

Slonem’s birds, rabbits, butterflies, flowers, and portraits of cultural and historical figures form an immediately recognizable iconography, made more distinctive through repetition and further defined by the highly individual techniques with which he paints them. Henry Geldzahler, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first curator of twentieth-century art, observed 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.” Cross-hatching, one such technique, involves painting wet-on-wet and scratching a grid of lines into the surface, reminiscent of the wires of a birdcage. In discussing Slonem’s cross-hatching technique, Roberta Smith, chief art critic of The New York Times, observed that “this witty Formalist strategy meshes the creatures into the picture plane and sometimes nearly obliterates them as images, but it also suspends and shrouds them in a dim, atmospheric light that is quite beautiful.” Slonem’s incorporation of diamond dust—finely crushed glass—into glossy resin surfaces recalls Warhol in material terms while producing a rougher, more light-reactive texture that is recognizably his own.

Slonem now works from a 37,000-square-foot studio building at 595 11th Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, which also houses his sixty pet birds. Alongside his studio practice, he restores historic properties across the United States, including Madewood and Lakeside in Louisiana, the Scranton Armory, Belle Terre in South Kortright, and, most recently, the 43,772-square-foot Seaview Terrace in Newport, Rhode Island, the largest privately owned Gilded Age mansion in Newport.

Slonem’s work is included in the permanent collections of 250 museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Serge Sorokko Gallery has organized major museum exhibitions of Slonem’s work and offers works included in those exhibitions, among them:

• Hunt Slonem: Paintings at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art / Russian Academy of Arts, Moscow, Russia (2015)
• Hunt Slonem at the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (2017)
• Hunt Slonem at the A. Kasteev State Museum of Arts, Almaty, Kazakhstan, and the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Astana, Kazakhstan (2018)
• Hunt Slonem at the Kiev Picture Gallery National Museum, Kiev, Ukraine, and the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art, Odessa, Ukraine (2019)
• Hunt Slonem: Magical World at the Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Center, Daugavpils, Latvia, and the G. Elias Jelgava Museum of Art and History, Jelgava, Latvia (2020)
• Hunt Slonem at the Šiauliai “Aušros” Museum: Chaim Frenkel Villa, Šiauliai, Lithuania, and at the Art Museum Riga Bourse, Riga, Latvia (2022)
• Hunt Slonem: Fantasia at the Osthaus Museum, Hagen, Germany (2022)
• Hunt Slonem: The World of Exotica / Die Welt der Exotik at Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien, Vienna, Austria (2023)
• Hunt Slonem: The Bunny Wall at Palazzo Bembo, Venice, Italy, during the 2024 Venice Biennale.