Bryan Hunt’s ‘Lunarium’ Comes To Duck Creek - 27 East

Arts & Living

Arts & Living / 1710358

Bryan Hunt’s ‘Lunarium’ Comes To Duck Creek

authorStaff Writer on Jul 6, 2020

The Arts Center at Duck Creek is pleased to announce “Lunarium” featuring paintings by artist Bryan Hunt. This exhibition will open to the public on July 11 and will remain on view through August 2.

The works presented in “Lunarium” are from a series of paintings which began as working diagrams for large scale sculptures that are not yet realized. Each of the three 10-foot high works shown depict a planet, and a painting, built of an amalgam of imagery and information from Hunt’s varying bodies of work. The fictional planets are anchored by black and white photographs that dictate the scale of the sphere and define its arc. At a glance, the collaged photographs could easily be mistaken for NASA’s mosaics of satellite telemetry, but they are photos of Hunt’s small hand-sculpted ceramic orbs shot in natural light. As the true materials of these clay surfaces are revealed to the viewer, Hunt’s adeptness at relational aesthetics kicks in and the displacement of scale has the effect of “shrinking the viewer, or expanding the context” as he says.

Much of Bryan Hunt’s two-dimensional drawings and paintings are clearly the work of a sculptor, featuring elegantly blocked negative space, carved lines, and surfaces that describe the movement of water or weight of stone. But these paintings offer us more. Like cartographers throughout history, Hunt emphasizes the visual and conceptual hierarchies in of each work with traditional mapping text and diagrams.

“They’re about drawing and mapping, the kind of freedom you’d have if you wandered around recording a fictional topography. It’s a made up journey: then I go back and paint that topography.” Hunt recalls, in a BOMB magazine interview with Jack Stephens. “They’re fictional places made up of features like plateaus, canyons, volcanoes, impact craters, ice fields and so on… Every mark I make is an event in that place and that place is an extraterrestrial orb. I’d like viewers to feel that this is as close to an astronomical object as they have ever been. At the same time, the works are paintings: there are drips, splashes and pours intertwined with circles, shadows and lines.”`

On the occasion of the artist’s Foundation Kajikawa Exhibition in Kyoto Japan, art critic Jerry Saltz writes of Hunt, “A poet of paradox, he casts a kind of spell over you and transports you, like some kind of Gulliver, though whole worlds of intimate scale and monumentality, to the land of levitating densities and disembodied mass. He is a poet of those things physical, material and formal, almost an alchemist of the earth — making metal flow like water and great mast hover, mysteriously, in space. He makes the unseeable world around us suddenly appear graspable, palpable and understandable.”

Bryan Hunt lives and works in New York City and Wainscott. In 1967, Hunt was hired as an engineer’s assistant and draftsman at Kennedy Space Center. After completing his BFA at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, Hunt attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and moved to Manhattan in 1976. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Lehmbruck, Duisburg, Germany.

In compliance with NY State Covid restrictions, there will not be any receptions for this exhibition. Visitors will be limited to five people at a time and are required to wear a mask indoors. All guests on the property must practice New York State defined social distancing at all times.

The Arts Center at Duck Creek is at 127 Squaw Road in East Hampton. Gallery hours are Thursday through Sunday 2 to 6 p.m. and by appointment. For further information visit duckcreek.com or contact Jess Frost at duckcreekarts@gmail.com.

You May Also Like:

At the Galleries for September 11, 2025

Montauk The Depot Art Gallery, 285 Edgemere Street, is presenting “All We See,” an exhibition ... 10 Sep 2025 by Staff Writer

Round and About for September 11, 2025

Music & Nightlife Mysteries, Deceptions and Illusions Allan Zola Kronzek, a sleight-of-hand artist, will perform ... by Staff Writer

U2 Tribute Band Unforgettable Fire Returns to The Suffolk September 27

Unforgettable Fire, considered the preeminent U2 tribute band in North America, will return to The ... by Staff Writer

Southampton Arts Center Presents Mountainfilm on Tour

Mountainfilm on Tour brings a selection of culturally rich, adventure-packed and inspiring documentary films curated ... by Staff Writer

Hamptons International Film Festival Expands to Southampton Playhouse With World Premiere of ‘Arthur Elgort: Models & Muses’ and Live ‘Nosferatu’ Screening

The Hamptons International Film Festival, presented by the Artemis Rising Foundation, announced Tuesday a new ... 9 Sep 2025 by Staff Writer

Big Stories in Small Packages: 'Mountainfilm on Tour' Returns to Southampton Arts Center

Every year, Southampton Arts Center hosts a unique one-day film festival that offers an intriguing ... by Annette Hinkle

'Endless Limits': Parrish Hosts Landmark James Howell Retrospective

James Howell was not one to reminisce about the past. His sight, and artist vision, ... by Michelle Trauring

Review: 'Leibisch’s Journey' Uncovers a Father’s Hidden Past

He’s a grown man when he hears his father, well into older age, speaking fluent ... 8 Sep 2025 by Joan Baum

It's 'Carmen' Reimagined: Opera With a Spanish Soul Takes the Bay Street Stage

We may be heading into the quieter months of the year in these parts, but ... by Annette Hinkle

In ‘The Missing Fruit,’ Movement Becomes a Vessel for Healing and Resistance

A new interdisciplinary dance work exploring the intersection of racial violence and public health will be presented in an in-process showing at Guild Hall on Saturday, September 13, at 7 p.m. Titled “The Missing Fruit (Part I)” and choreographed by Roderick George, founder of kNoname Artist, the performance is co-presented by Guild Hall and Pomegranate Arts. The piece is set to an original score by musical duo Slowdanger and was first conceptualized during the Black Lives Matter protests. It reflects on the experiences of Black, Indigenous and people of color confronting systemic oppression, economic insecurity and health inequities — while ... by Staff Writer