NATIONAL GALLERY FOR FOREIGN ART
MUSEUM GALLERY FOR MODERN ART
present an exhibition of
HUNT SLONEM
PAINTINGS
FROM THE ARTIST’S PERSONAL COLLECTION SHOWN AT MUSEUMS IN THE UNITED STATES, EUROPE AND LATIN AMERICA
On April 29th 2010, at 6 p.m., an exhibition of the American artist Hunt Slonem will open at the National Gallery for Foreign Art in Sofia. This is a joint project of the Gallery and the Museum Gallery for Modern Art in Sofia, a yet novel for Bulgaria project of partnership between a public museum of art and a private commercial gallery, two institutions with diametrically opposed approaches to the domain of the visual arts. One of the partners stakes on its conservative elitist prestige of a national institution with its quarter-century exhibition traditions and public educational activity, while the other, as a newly established cultural centre with its circle of affluent art lovers, is seeking wider publicity and recognition.
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The holding of two concurrent exhibitions of the same artist is not a new idea; new is the attempt to present and discuss an artist’s work from two distinctive viewpoints, to consider different, though equally characteristic features and aspects of it.
The American artist arrives in Sofia at the invitation of the Museum Gallery for Modern Art, and it is there that will take place his ‘official’ presentation to the public on April 28th. According to what has been published in the press by the private gallery, they will put accent on the celebrity of a New York star, and stir up interest in the lifestyle of this ‘eccentric’ – an essential and integral part of the popular myth of a successful artist. Attention will be drawn to the more striking aspects of his art centred on fashion design and interior decoration and to his influential presence in such magazines as Brava Casa, House Beautiful and Elle Decor. Emphasis will also be laid on the media image of the artist and on his popularity in the circles of the fashion and movie business. Presenting his virtuoso, vibrant and exuberant painting on exotic themes, the Museum Gallery are sure to map out the model of the typically American rise to celebrity, an essential prerequisite for financial success.
After the “Dialogue with Humanity” of Sigal Bussel, the National Gallery for Foreign Art will present the art of Hunt Slonem in a series of exhibitions of American artists intended to familiarize the Bulgarian spectator with various trends in the visual arts beyond the Atlantic, of which quite much is known ‘on paper’, but which have practically never been experienced ‘in the original’. After the post-modern installation of the Californian artist Bussel in her analytical and ‘ready-made’ style, the exhibition of the artist from New York will strike a more familiar and comprehensible note since, on the face of it, it does not perplex the viewer with philosophical speculations. The themes are simple and repetitive, the compositions decorative, the painterly idiom masterful, the chromatic tissue brilliantly impastoed and lively. In substance, however, this exhibition also exemplifies the principle of the postmodern installation: recurring images-modules poised in a precarious balance between expressive naivism and a sought for ubiquitous uniformity or pattern. Or, to quote a critical assessment: “In a way, his activity is more performative then productive: what we see is painting as verb as much as noun. With each work we have a further instalment of a unique personality, rather than a thing in itself.” As an American critic notes elsewhere, in Hunt Slonem’s work intertwine elements from the phantasms of Frida Kahlo with the neo-expressionistic energy of Francesco Clemente and strong inspirations from Francis Picabia, but these expansive, diffuse and whimsical paintings of birds, butterflies and imaginary portraits of saints are hard to reduce to a terminological frame of reference. Not only the frame but also the wide field of pop art, because in his life as in his work Hunt Slonem confirms one of the numerous definitions of this movement: “The basic activity of a pop-art artist, the meaning of what he does, boils down not so much to the creation of distinct works as the making sense of the surrounding reality, the acceptance of the ambience’s logic as the logic also of what he himself creates.” (artcritical, Richmond Burton by David Cohen).
The exhibition will be open until May 29th 2010.
