RICHARD HULL – Mirror and Bone

In galleries one & two

March 3 to April 22, 2023

For his fifth solo show at Western Exhibitions, Richard Hull presents new paintings of bulbous, energized abstracted figures, broadening the amorphous heads and hairstyles he’s depicted for the past several years into fully-formed characters. Before graduating from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 1979, Hull joined the legendary Phyllis Kind Gallery, the primary dealer of many of Chicago’s Imagist artists. At the time, his paintings were known for their abstracted architectural interiors. More recently, Hull has returned to the loose-limbed figuration of the Imagist era. Considered more romantic and painterly than his forebearers, his repetitive gestures and inscriptions limn reverberating abstract heads and bulbous hairstyles. Imagining these abstract portraits to be inner mirrors, containers in which repetitive thinking and behaviours are visualized, Hull has now added bodies and limbs. Utilizing both galleries 1 and 2 at the Western Exhibitions Chicago location, this show opens on Friday, March 3 with a free public reception and runs through April 22, 2023. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11 to 6pm.

In gallery 1, Richard Hull’s newest paintings and drawings depict multiple figures in various enigmatic tableaus, born of frenetic marks that somehow coalesce into coherent scenes or events. Are the figures in conversation? Confrontation? The narratives are slippery with senses of disorientation, discombobulation and vertigo. Compositions are complex, influences run deep (Max Beckmann, Philip Guston, H.C. Westermann to name a few) and his techniques utilize his vast index of pictorial tools. Whereas Hull’s earlier “stolen portraits” paintings relied upon interaction with the viewer, the characters are now more autonomous, free to interact within the painting plane, and sometimes are even a little naughty. This change came about, to quote the artist, “simply from a desire to have the characters stand up, literally.” The color pink dominates the five paintings on view in gallery 2. It is an intense pink that belies the notion that pink is soft and nonaggressive, so strident is Hull’s hue. The paintings are in conversation with each other about how very similar things might still maintain a uniqueness of character. The pink is the same pink in each painting.

Richard Hull has paintings, drawings and prints in the collections of several museums including the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Smithsonian Museum, Washington, D.C.; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Smart Museum, Chicago. He has exhibited his work at many of the above institutions as well as at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; Portland Art Museum, OR; the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH; Herron Gallery of Art, Indianapolis, IN; Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Evanston IL; and the Painting Center, New York, NY. He lives and works in Chicago.

Pictured: Departure, 2023. Oil and wax on linen, 48h x 60w in.