On November 11, Moss Galleries will present the first exhibition in 17 years in Maine of paintings by internationally recognized artist Hunt Slonem. Born in 1951 in Kittery, Maine, Slonem is a New York-based painter, sculptor, and printmaker best known for his Neo-Expressionist paintings of tropical birds and bunnies. Hunt Slonem: Returns to Maine will be on view through February 6, 2021.

Hunt Slonem: Returns to Maine features 19 paintings ranging in scale as well as medium. Slonem's Blue Tanzanite (2018) is a 48 x 48-inch oil and acrylic painting sprinkled with diamond dust on canvas while Nirvana in Pinks (2019) is oil, resin, and acrylic on canvas making the surface highly reflective. The exhibition will also include a large wall graphic, a reference to the artist's popular line of wallpapers and textiles as well as his passion for historic home restoration and decoration.

Even though Slonem was educated at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, he attributes his courses and time spent in Madison, Maine at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture as pivotal. While at the Skowhegan School, he was exposed to influential artists from New York including Louise Nevelson, Alex Katz, Richard Estes, and Jack Levine. 

Slonem’s works can be found in the permanent collections of 250 museums around the world, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney, Miro Foundation, New Orleans Museum of Art, and Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine. He received several prestigious grants, including from Montreal’s Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cultural Council Foundation’s Artist Project, for which he painted an 80-foot mural of the World Trade Center in the late 1970s.

In 1993 art critic and friend, Henry Geldzahler observed, "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." According to Slonem, the repetitive imagery is a reference to Andy Warhol: "I was influenced by Warhol's repetition of soup cans and Marilyn, but I'm more interested in doing it in the sense of prayer...it's really a form of worship." Slonem's deep interest in nature, its jungle creatures, and his own 60 pet birds are reflected in his choice of subject matter. 

Related Programs - Interviews with Hunt Slonem
Join us on our Facebook page on Friday, November 6 at 6 p.m., when Portland Museum of Art Curator of Contemporary Art, Jaime DeSimone interviews Slonem about his four paintings in their collection and the impact that Maine has had on his artwork. Moss Galleries is proud to be a corporate partner of the Portland Museum of Art.  

Join us on our Facebook page on Wednesday, November 11 at 6 p.m., when Elizabeth Moss and Hunt Slonem engage in a dialogue about his work, his relationship with the late art critic Henry Geldzahler, and the mediative quality of his paintings.

To register for both these events, visit our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/elizabethmossgalleries. The talks will also be posted at a later date on our website at www.elizabethmossgalleries.com. 

Hunt Slonem Biography:  https://www.huntslonem.com/resume/biography