Alexis Hunter: Chimera

TOTAH is pleased to present Chimera, an exhibition of work by New Zealand–born artist Alexis Hunter (1948–2014). Marking Hunter’s first presentation in New York since her inclusion in the landmark 2008 touring exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, this show also marks the forty-year anniversary of her 1986 exhibition in New York with Edward Totah. Chimera explores the distinctive visual mythology of Alexis Hunter’s paintings developed during the 1980s into a destabilizing psychological register. Birds, reptiles, mammals and half human hybrids, recognizable from Greco-Roman myth and legend, come together to form creatures that haunt urban landscapes and agitate at the edges of archetype. Formed in the political climate of 1970s Britain, Hunter’s practice responded directly to the social realities of the Thatcher era. Growing up, Hunter observed that she developed “a bizarre imagination to cope with the hypocrisy of society.” After graduating from Elam School of Fine Art in Auckland in 1972, she moved to London and became deeply involved in the emerging British women’s movement. She initially used photographic sequences to center female perspective and experience, developing a language of warning signs and symbols. In the late 1970s, she returned to painting to “do new things with old forms,” joining Edward Totah Gallery in 1980, where she participated in ten exhibitions over six years. In the mid-1980s, while serving as Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Houston, Hunter absorbed influences from Mayan architecture and mythology. Chimera spans three decades of Hunter’s practice, and revisits paintings that were sites for personal, political, and allegorical stories to converge. The exhibition is realized with the support of the Alexis Hunter Estate, and curated by gallery Director Sophia McKinnon, a New Zealander long aware of Hunter’s work, who observes “the enduring potency of Hunter’s paintings comes from their irresolution –in constant motion, questioning states of being, inviting us into chaos and change.”