The Brooklyn Rail

Metal sculptor Richard Hunt’s (1935–2023) posthumous retrospective at White Cube Bermondsey in London celebrates industrialism. Richard Hunt: Metamorphosis – A Retrospective is the Chicago-born artist’s first major European showcase; it presents over thirty major works crafted between 1955 and Hunt’s passing in 2023.

Hero’s Head (1956) anchors the exhibition both chronologically and conceptually. Created when Hunt was twenty years old, shortly after witnessing Emmett Till’s brutalized body at his open-casket visitation, the work repurposes scrap metal into a study of violence and memorial. The sculpture’s impact lies in its strategic abstraction, in its complex layering of depths and reliefs with patination that combines dark steel surfaces with areas of burnished gold. Hunt’s methods engage Theodor Adorno’s discourse on the ethical potential of abstraction: instead of obscuring historical suffering, as Adorno cautioned against, Hunt intensifies emotional clarity with formal, intricate complexity.

Roman Hybrid (1979) exemplifies Hunt’s complex—though not always frictionless—engagement with the European modernist canon embodied by Constantin Brâncuși’s abstract idealism, Pablo Picasso’s deconstructive gaze, and Alberto Giacometti’s existential isolation. Conceived to honor Olympic icon and civil rights figure Jesse Owens upon receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Hunt’s bronze sculpture distills the dynamic energy of Owens's athletic form into a fluid, cantilevered abstraction. Hunt’s sculpture deliberately creates friction by simultaneously adopting and challenging established aesthetic traditions—forming, in essence, a new interpretative community grounded in hybridized historical and cultural discourse. However, while Hunt ambitiously interrogates classical European forms, one might question whether the smooth synthesis fully disrupts the hierarchical narratives embedded within classical tradition, or if it merely presents a harmonious negotiation, thus potentially softening the historical tensions it seeks to highlight. Yet, precisely through this tension—between homage and critique—the work reveals its greatest intellectual strength, becoming a nuanced meditation on the interplay of cultural appropriation, representation, and Black identity within Western art historical frameworks.

Among the most revelatory works is Steel Garden (2013), installed in the Bermondsey courtyard. The massive stainless-steel form rises from its circular base; it evokes botanical growth while acknowledging the industrial history central to the Great Migration. Originally commissioned for the U.S. Steel Corporation’s mill in Chicago, the work points to the significance of steel manufacturing for millions of Black Americans who migrated north during this period, drawn to economic opportunity and the comparative freedom of industrial centers at the time. Hunt’s choice of stainless steel, a material of industry reconfigured into a botanical metaphor, speaks to the material presence of art and its corresponding influence on emotional engagement. For Hunt, industrial production contained transformative power similar to natural processes.

Hunt’s technical mastery has long served philosophical aims. His welds appear sometimes prominently, other times nearly invisible, culminating in a visual rhythm across the surface of each work. This technical control collapses distinctions between high and low cultural production; in this way, the retrospective demonstrates how Hunt carried the weight of industrial craftsmanship yet achieved near universal resonance. Accessible to broad audiences and emotionally resonant, his work has become all the more relevant as audiences reflect on modernism’s contested legacies.

Hunt believed in metal’s aliveness, each weld moving from solid to liquid and back again, as seen in Reaching Up (2022), one of the artist’s final works. The large-scale bronze sculpture, with its dramatic vertical thrust splitting into two gestural extensions at its peak, evokes arboreal imagery that symbolized inner and outer growth in equal measure. This work embodies Hunt’s devotion to spaces where motion and memory intersect.

The retrospective documents how Hunt’s body of work has tracked seismic changes in American society. By the 1970s, having earned a MoMA retrospective at age thirty-five, Hunt abandoned figurative expression almost entirely. His monumental public commissions employed an abstract vocabulary to memorialize civil rights leaders and address the Black American experience, and this transition proved an extension of activism rather than a move away from it. Accordingly, the White Cube exhibition honors an artist who refused easy categorization. Neither fully abstract nor figurative, neither solely formal nor explicitly political, Hunt inhabited the space between supposed opposites. Standing before these works decades after their creation, the viewer is invited to read an all-American story: one of material transformation as metaphor for social change. In Hunt’s hands, industrial materials transcend their origins and become vessels for memory and witnesses to history. This is the essence of metamorphosis that gives the exhibition its name.