During the pandemic in New York, Paul Hunter walked to the gardens near the Cloisters at the northern tip of Manhattan every day. After several weeks of observing the seasonal changes, impressions of the beauty and color of the fleeting blooms appeared in his landscape paintings, a theme he is now exploring…

^{Confinement Garden #N, 36 x 36 inches (91 x 91 cm), aluminum, acrylic on canvas. $14,000.}

^{Confinement Garden #AK, 30 x 40 inches (76 x 102 cm), aluminum, acrylic on canvas. $10,000.}

^{Confinement Garden #L, 36 x 36 inches (91 x 91 cm), aluminum, acrylic on canvas. $14,000.}

^{Confinement Garden #AJ, 30 x 40 inches (76 x 102 cm), aluminum, acrylic on canvas. $10,000.}

To place an order or for more information, please send me an email 99@newyork5000.com

Below paintings are a sampling of one of a kind originals by Paul Hunter. Many of these works are painted on gold- bronze- aluminum or silver leaf, creating a spectacular sheen, luminescence! The smaller works here have the perfect entry price point for starting a Paul Hunter collection. For a PDF of available works, content and pricing, please send me an email to 99@newyork5000.com.

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Paul Hunter Summary of Artistic Development and Career

Paul Hunter was born in Paris in 1954 to Canadian parents during while his father was studying at the school of the Louvre Museum. Both of his parents were artists and he grew up in Quebec City, knowing from a young age that he wanted to become a professional artist. After earning a Masters degree in Fine Arts at Concordia University, Montreal, he moved to New York City in 1981. He continues to live and work in his his studio in West Harlem.

The first artworks he made in New York took the form of miniature installations inserted at the ends of long narrow boxes perforated by “windows”  that allowed light to penetrate inside. These box sculptures were influenced by his experience of riding through New York on his bicycle and seeing the sunlight framed by the dark corridors of the tall buildings lining Manhattan’s streets. The quest for luminosity has been an underlying theme in his art. 

The box sculptures required viewers to hold them in their hands in order to see the scenes within. Moving them back and forth allows viewers to change the lighting and to recreate the effect of light changing throughout the day. These experiential participatory works were introduced in his first New York solo exhibition, Chamber Music in New York City, presented at Artists Space, a prominent alternative gallery in Tribeca. This exhibition was quickly followed by several others. In 1986, he was so honored to included in the P.S.1 National Studio Program, then located in lower Manhattan, and to finally have his own studio. 

These box sculptures were exhibited to great acclaim in 1986 in Light: Perception-Projection, shown at the Centre International d’Art Contemporain in Montreal. The New York Times and the most important newspapers in Canada all published extremely favorable articles singling out Paul Hunter’s remarkable boxes. Later that same year, he was invited to create a life-sized installation, White Noise, at the prestigious exhibition space, Grey Art Gallery, at New York University.

Following upon these exhibitions he was invited to join the renowned Tibor de Nagy Gallery on 57^th and exhibited there regularly from 1987 until Tibor died in 1992. His 1987 sculpture exhibition, Petrefacta, which presented low relief “landscapes” hand-formed from black ceramic encased within museum-style display cases, traveled to France, Belgium and Canada. A series of limited-edition engravings and dry points accompanied the sculptures. In 1990 the Musée National des Beaux Arts du Quebec held a major solo exhibition presenting his work from the previous five years. It was a well-attended and received by the general public and the press.

In 1992 after working in bronze, and seeing the golden gleam of the freshly cast metal, Paul Hunter began covering large areas of his paintings on canvas in gold leaf,  fascinated by its exceptional luminous qualities. These glowing gold leaf and metal leaf abstract landscapes and seascapes were widely exhibited in the USA and internationally after first being presented in a solo exhibition, Reflected Landscapes, at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

Continuing in his quest to capture light, Paul Hunter developed a series of mesmerizing shimmering outdoor installations by suspending long strips of gold mylar and cascades of tiny lightbulbs from tall trees, one of these, Artifice, was created specifically for Riverside Park, New York, where it was installed in 1996.

During this period Paul Hunter was exhibiting extensively in the USA and internationally, including in Germany at the now closed AHO Gallery in Cologne. He was the first contemporary artist to have a solo exhibition in the Kapitelsaal of the Abtei Brauweiler in Pulheim-Brauweiler. This solo was followed by Gotik, a solo presentation in Maternushaus, also in Cologne. His paintings were shown in several non-traditional spaces, including in the show room of Hammer Rolls-Royce, also in Cologne.

Over the years, his landscape paintings became increasingly abstract. His recent works are composed entirely through a process of linear repetition of hand-drawn horizontal lines individually traced across the entire width of the canvas from the left edge to the right edge. The awareness of time is intensified in both my embodied physical creation of these lines, and in the viewer’s perception of them. These works recall landscapes or suggest certain musical characteristics.  The artist has stated that “music, like a walk through a landscape unfolds over time, in a flow, with beginnings and ends, and crescendos and lulls, depending on what we notice, or where we started.”  

During the pandemic in New York Paul Hunter walked to the gardens near the Cloisters at the northern tip of Manhattan every day. After several weeks of observing the seasonal changes, impressions of the beauty and color of the fleeting blooms appeared in his landscape paintings, a theme he is now exploring.

Paul Hunter’s work is in private, corporate and museum collections worldwide, and he has received numerous awards. He has exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions in the USA, Canada, South America, Europe, the United Arab Emirates, India, China and Japan.  His work has been exhibited in many museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Alternative Museum, the Drawing Center, P.S. 1, the Montclair Art Museum, the Museum of Princeton University, the Knoxville Museum of Art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Quebec Museum.

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