PRESS RELEASE
Jun Kaneko and Hunt Slonem
Dec 4, 2008 – Jan 31, 2009
FOR IMMIEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Cristin Lane or Beverly Cuyler
For more information call 561.241.3050 or www.elainebakergallery.com
BOCA RATON, FL (November 11, 2008) – Elaine Baker Gallery announces the upcoming exhibition of paintings by Hunt Slonem and sculpture by Jun Kaneko. The exhibition opens on Thursday, December 4, 2008 and continues until January 31, 2009 with both artists in attendance.
Hunt Slonem was born in Kittery, Maine in 1951 and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1973 from Tulane University, New Orleans, LA and studied painting at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Slonem’s fascination with exotica imprinted during his childhood in Hawaii and experience as a foreign exchange student in Nicaragua. Since 1973, he has lived and worked in New York City in his legendary loft with 70 tropical birds populating the labyrinthine studio. So enmeshed and unique are his aviary, studio, lifestyle and painting, that Slonem has developed an eccentric style and remarkable maturity as an artist.
His work depicts a reverence for exotic life forms, birds, butterflies and flowers. Once a painting has been completed with visual stories and compositional balancing acts, he inscribes the surface with a furiously cross-hatched mesh of lines, cutting through the rich oil to give an abstract, painterly and tactile effect with an implied impression of spatial depth.
Slonem’s paintings are in over 50 museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Guggenheim Museum, NY, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, Tel Aviv Museum, Israel, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA.
Jun Kaneko was born in 1942 in Nagoya, Japan and came to the United States in the 1960’s. Particularly drawn to sculptural ceramics, Kaneko studied at the Chouinard Institute of Art during a pivotal time when ceramics as functional craft was expanding to embrace the highest levels of contemporary artistic expression. After studying with Peter Voulkos, Paul Soldner, and Ken Price in California, Kaneko emerged during the time now identified as the contemporary movement or the “America Clay Revolution.”
Jun Kaneko’s work is defined by its overwhelming scale and exquisite form, implying a spatial relationship between the object and viewer. Evidence of Kaneko’s early years as a painter exists in the richly glazed surfaces and rhythmic pulse of his marks and patterns. Their sheer size combined with the artists hunger to push the physical limitations of his material, generate an undeniable presence in the work.
In 2006 the Joslyn Art Museum presented Jun Kaneko: Madama Butterfly, an exhibition celebrating the artist’s set and costume designs for Opera Omaha's performance of Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly.
Kaneko’s sculpture is in over 50 museum collections including American Crafts Museum, NY, The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan, Los Angeles County Museum, CA, the Toledo Museum in Ohio and Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI.