Outgrown Pyramid II 1973

A native Chicagoan, Richard Hunt's career has spanned five decades. His stature among American sculptors has been recognized by numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, inclusion in the Lincoln Academy, the highest civilian honor that the State of Illinois confers, and honorary degrees from twelve colleges and universities, including GSU. He earned his BAE degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1957.

Hunt's interest in Spanish artists Julio Gonzalez and Pablo Picasso, along with American Abstract Expressionist sculptor David Smith, is reflected in his approach to making sculpture in which he displays a mastery of direct metal, open-form welding. He has always had an interest in creating art of a public nature, working with metals as varied as Cor-Ten and stainless steels, brass, and bronze to create his permanent, insistently contemporary works.

Outgrown Pyramid II was exhibited in 1974 as one of a pair of works in the Grant Park exhibition Sculpture in the Park. Its companion piece, Large Planar Hybrid is part of the Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park collection and can be found in front of C-Wing, just west of the university’s main entrance. Both works arrived in 1976 for the groundbreaking exhibition The Sculptor, the Campus, and the Prairie.

Outgrown Pyramid II reflects Hunt's unique vision and mature style. Here, he has combined elements of biomorphic and geometric abstraction. However, unlike Large Planar Hybrid, which provides the viewer with images of birds, this earlier work seeks a purely abstract formal resolution between the sweeping steel wave cresting the work and the immobile stability of its pyramid form below.