Richard Hull received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1979 and while still a student joined the Phyllis Kind Gallery, the primary dealer of many of Chicago’s legendary Imagist artists. At the time he was known for painting abstracted architectural interiors. His current work takes the loose-limbed figuration of that era to a more romantic and painterly place where repetitive marks reverberate around abstract heads and bulbous hairstyles. Hull considers these figures to be inner mirrors, containers in which repetitive thinking and behaviours are visualized. Repetition represents temporal rhythms and accumulating variations.
Curating conversation between colour and form, Hull’s oil on wax on linen paintings and crayon on paper drawings are portraits and hairdos, each one expressing a distinct visual personality rather than a legible representation of a specific individual. He calls his over-capacitated, robust, mysterious heads stolen portraits. This quasi-figurative direction started with, of all things, drawing a horse’s tail for an exquisite corpse in a performative collaboration with MacArthur award-winning saxophonist and composer Ken Vandermark and the illustrator and printmaker Dan Grzeca.
New painted sculptures take the form of double-sided vanity mirrors that point to Hull’s interest in opposing forces within paintings. After encountering the new sculptural heads, writer John Yau noted in Hyperallergic the transformation and direction of Hull’s recent work: “After mastering his vocabulary of looping, concentric forms, Hull is clearly pushing them in different ways, toward unexpected trajectories. […] Even as Hull courts this figurative reading while making a nod to vanity mirrors, the blooms of petal-like forms painted on both sides push towards abstraction. We might read the petals as tongues and the painted vacuoles within them as eyes, or we might read them as wings.”
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, Kansas City; the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; Contemporary Art 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 joined the legendary Phyllis Kind Gallery before graduating from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 1979 and had numerous shows in both her New York City and Chicago locations. Richard Hull is represented by Western Exhibitions, Chicago.