Richard Hull

Richard Hull joined the Phyllis Kind Gallery before his graduation in 1979 from the School of the Art Institute Chicago, where many of Chicago’s legendary Imagist painters showed in the late-1970’s. He was known then for painting “abstracted architectural interiors where towers, gabled roofs, and arched doorways combine with geometric solids and intersecting planes to form a framework in which various figurative elements are situated.” Hull calls his recent paintings and drawings “stolen portraits.” His crayon drawings, which respond to the paintings, in particular, are portraits in the form of hairdos, each one expressing a distinct visual personality rather than a representation of a particular individual. 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. In Hull’s portraits, horsetails now resemble looping flower petal forms – building blocks for portrait-like structures. The bulbous loops are accentuated by minute, repetitive, often concentric curves within the large masses.

Richard Hull has paintings, drawings and prints in the collections of several museums including the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Smithsonian Museum, Washington, D.C.; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Smart Museum, Chicago. He has exhibited his work at the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; 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.

Courtesy of Western Exhibitions