REPRODUCTIVE! Kenny Hunter

About

Hunter’s work for both the public realm and the gallery embodies his main preoccupation, the place of monumental sculpture within the contemporary world and its relationship to cultural memory. He sees history as a series of recurrent themes that each time come back slightly altered. For Hunter, the human condition is relatively stable and universal despite the belief systems that occur across eras and geography. His sculptures reflect this in their graphic character and unusual mix of very traditional and modern subject matter.

In his own words “Within my work as a sculptor, scepticism and uncertainties play a seminal role. Although I derive inspiration from the past, the subject matter I use draws upon contemporary popular culture – its morals, politics and belief systems.”

For this exhibition his starting point has been an interrogation of reproductive processes within sculpture and the broader implications these have for thinking about the world. Utilising both traditional and emerging digital sculptural processes Hunter questions art’s fixation with authenticity and the importance of the original, undermining the derogatory notion of the copy as something unquestionably inferior, instead promoting the idea of reproduction as an act of creativity, fecundity and abundance.