RICHARD TAITTINGER GALLERY is pleased to announce the representation of iconic American artist, Hunt Slonem (b.1971), presenting his first solo show in New York City in close to three years. SPIRIT IN NATURE. This marquee exhibition will showcase the artist’s expansive flora and fauna subject focuses, both in smallscale portraits and rare large-scale works, along with select pieces never presented before–all centered on Hunt’s deep intertwining focus toward the spirit of naturalism across the span of his muti-decade career.

Inspired by Nature and the Spirit of his 60 pet birds that surround the paint stacked easels of his Chelsea studio. Hunt Slonem is renowned for his distinct neoexpressionist style and best known for his series of bunnies, butterflies, and tropical birds.

“There is a unique spirit in the animals, plants, and our living environment— each that hint at a need for care toward our planet and the nature within it.”

After graduating with a degree in painting and art history from Tulane University in New Orleans, Slonem spent several years in the early 1970s living in Manhattan. It wasn’t until Janet Fish offered him her studio in the summer of 1975 that Slonem was able to fully immerse himself in his work. His pieces began showing around New York, propelling his reputation and thrusting him into the city’s explosive contemporary arts scene. He received several prestigious grants, including from Montreal’s Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cultural Counsel Foundation’s Artist Project, for which he painted an 80- foot mural of the World Trade Center in the late 1970s.

Numerous books and monographs have chronicled Slonem’s art, including Bunnies (Glitterari Inc., 2014), Birds (Glitterati Inc., 2017) Butterflies (Glitterati Inc. 2022), and The Bigger Picture (Scala Arts Publishers Inc., 2021) to name a few. His studios and homes have been profiled in such books as The Spirited Homes of Hunt Slonem (Gibbs Smith, 2023), World of Folly (Assouline Publishing, 2018), When Art Meets Design (Assouline Publishing, 2014), and Pleasure Palaces: The Art and Homes of Hunt Slonem (PowerHouse Books, 2007). He also received an introduction to the Marlborough Gallery which would represent him for 18 years.

As Slonem honed his aesthetic, his work began appearing in unique, contextual spaces. By 1995, he finished a massive 6-by-86-foot mural of birds, which shoots across the walls of the Bryant Park Grill Restaurant in New York City.

His charity contribution has resulted to dozens of partnerships, including a wallpaper of his famous bunnies designed specifically with Lee Jofa for the Ronald McDonald House in Long Island. Slonem continues to draw great inspiration from history, forging palpable connections to the past through his art.

Slonem’s works can be found in the permanent collections of 250 museums around the world including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Whitney, the Miro Foundation and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Since his first solo show at the Fischbach Gallery in 1977, Slonem’s work has been showcased internationally hundreds of times, most recently at the Vienna Kunstforum Museum (2023), the Art Museum Riga Bourse, Riga, Latvia European Union (2022), the Siauliai Aušros Museum, Lithuania (2022) and the Osthaus-Museum Hagen, Hagen, Germany (2022).

The opening reception will be at the Richard Taittinger Gallery, 154 Ludlow Street, on September 14th from 6 – 10 PM. The Opening reception is invite only. Spirit in Nature will be in show from September 14th – November 5th.

For Inquiries

Feel free to inquire about this exhibition below: