TEW Galleries is pleased to announce our 3rd solo exhibition of paintings by internationally acclaimed Hunt Slonem. Slonem came to notice in New York in the mid-1970s and has subsequently had over 350 one-man shows in galleries and museums internationally. His work is in the permanent collections of over 100 museums including the Solomon R. Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. In 2015, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, in conjunction with the Russian Academy of Arts and the Serge Sorokko Gallery, held a one person Hunt Slonem exhibition featuring 34 important recent paintings.
Slonem is well known for his neo-expressionist works of butterflies, rabbits and tropical birds, the latter inspired by the exotic feathered friends he houses in an aviary in his New York studio. While the idea of painting bunnies might initially seem trite, these quick and marvelously spirited works capture, through gesture, texture, color and a sense of pop-whimsy, the artist’s inimical personality. The effect of these quickly sketched creatures is like a shot of a joyous potion. But Slonem is more than an image maker, he is a highly accomplished painter. The acclaimed Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler said that “Slonem is a painter, a painter’s painter with an enormous bag of technical tricks which become more apparent to the viewer the longer he stands before the work.”
Hunt Slonem says of his art: “I’m exhilarated by nature, including birds, plants and butterfly forms that most people don’t even know exist. I collected all of those things when I was an exchange student in Nicaragua, and caught my first morpho butterfly, which is an exquisite iridescent blue when I was 16. I think my art comes from being born somehow conscious of other realms, which is what the divine is all about. I grew orchids as a child, and have long recognized that orchids and birds come from those places as a gift to humanity.”
Slonem has also created a textile collection and published several books about his art, personal style and his historic properties. The latest tome is Gatekeeper: World of Folly and is published by Assouline. Reserve your signed copy $100 + tax immediately by contacting the gallery.
