‘Morgan City’ is a signature gestural butterfly painting by Hunt Slonem. Butterflies can be found throughout Slonem’s Neo-expressionist body of work. The background of the painting is a brilliant metallic silver, contrasting the wings of the lilac and lavender butterflies. Slonem goes back into the painting with the end of his brush to carve out a grid like pattern, giving the painting an energetic texture. This is a unique framed work created in 2023 with dimensions 17.7 x 15.5 x 1 in.
Hunt Slonem (b. 1951, Kittery, ME) is an American artist best known for his “maximalist” paintings of wildlife exotica — most famously birds, rabbits and butterflies. Drawing inspiration from the spiritual and natural worlds, Slonem repeats these motifs on an epic scale in an act of visual and artistic mantra. Rendered through loose, gestural brushwork, his figures dissolve into rhythmic patterns at the edges of abstraction, creating symphonies of color, line and form across a highly textural canvas. His oeuvre’s meditative qualities are equally matched, by a “remarkable levity… a lightness of being” (Henry Geldzahler, Metropolitan Museum of Art 1996).
Slonem has also received critical acclaim for his restorations of national historic monuments, including Gilded Age mansions and Antebellum plantations, which the artist saves from neglect and fills with installations combining his work with collections of 19th century antiques.
Slonem has exhibited the world-over and has had over 350 shows, including 20 museum exhibitions. In Summer 2019 Slonem had a special exhibitions with the National Museum of Art in Kiev and the Odessa Museum of Eastern and Western Art.