The career of the forty-one-year-old artist Bryan Hunt is, by Eighties standards, an anomalous one. His first one-man show, at SoHo’s Clocktower gallery in 1974, was well received; and by the early Eighties, at a time when critical and commercial attention was focused mainly on painters, he was one of the few sculptors to have achieved a measure of recognition. Even so, none of this has resulted in the kind of major visibility accorded to other artists of his generation who have had similarly auspicious beginnings. There’s been no mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum, for example, as there was last season for Julian Schnabel and Elizabeth Murray.
Thus we can be grateful for the show this spring at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University entitled “Falls and Figtures.”[1] The Show gathered together some fifty of Hunt’s drawings and sculptures from the last fifteen years, concentrating on his signature “waterfalls”—free-standing vertical ribbons of bronze resembling cascades of water halted in mid-flow—and the abstract drapery-like figures that evolved out of them. It wasn’t a perfect exhibition—the “falls” work better than the “figures”—but it was worthwhile for the insights it offered into Hunt’s evolution as an artist.
In the early Seventies, when he began making sculpture, Hunt shared with many of his contemporaries a desire to amplify the austerely abstract language of the time by introducing representational elements—subject matter, in other words. His approach was to replicate well-known, recognizable structures, to reduce their size, and
