ABSTRACT
Born in 1935, Richard Hunt has been exhibiting his work for the better part of a decade. The technical feat by which such drawingin-space is accomplished—construction by means of welding together discrete metal forms—introduces, of course, a whole range of expressive possibilities new to both sculpture and calligraphy, and some of the most impressive works in the direct-metal canon derive from the audacity with which these possibilities have been perceived and exploited. Hunt's use of "line" in sculpture—and by "line," of course, one means those slender masses of steel rod or tubing which are Hunt's customary materials—is probably the subtlest and most elegant in current art. The result is a sculptural style whose calligraphic traceries are free of pictorial illusionism, free of painterly precedents in structure as well as technique, and thus all the more forthright in its particular combination of linear invention and lyric finesse.
