What first attracted me to
James Hunter’s work was the fact that it was very different to anything I’d ever seen before, and do I see a lot of work by different artists on a daily basis. Highly finished and perfectly presented, there was something very interesting about these abstracts, and the more I found out about them and heard about James’ journey to get to them, the more appealing they became.
A working-class lad from Lancashire, James studied his BA (hons) at Leeds Metropolitan University where he worked in an artist duo with his twin brother Anthony - who was also on the course - to create painting and performance pieces. At the end of the course they submitted collaborative work and two copies of the same contextual document, which resulted in them both achieving a 1st class honours. Shortly after graduating in summer 2009, Damien Hirst was advertising for identical twins to sit beneath his spot paintings in the blockbuster exhibition 'POP LIFE' at Tate Modern, so James and Anthony applied and got the job, which involved them sitting in the exhibition while wearing the same clothes, staring at the visitors who came to view the show. As performance artists this was a great opportunity for them and they still feel today that they were carrying on their own practice in some way.
A few months later the brothers both applied for jobs as painting assistants for an unknown employer, who they later found out was Hirst. As recent art graduates their applications were successful and Anthony was placed in London and James was given the same job in a different studio in Stroud. A year or so later after sitting beneath Hirst’s spots, they were now painting them. After a while James was relocated to the London studio working with Antony again, but after a year there he has recently left the studio altogether to focus on his own work and develop his career as an emerging artist.
Having worked as a technician for
Damien Hirst for over two years, James naturally started to experiment with the butterflies and spots he’d been working on, however after realising this was a “tedious and boring process” that he wanted to move away from, he became frustrated with painting and the thought processes and self-questioning that comes with it. This led to a consideration of what the ‘opposite’ of this structured format he’d become accustomed to was. Realising that it was important to enjoy the journey in making the work, he began to empty his mind and try and not be aware of what was happening on the canvas. He’d start at a certain point and then every subsequent mark he made was a response to what he saw, every mark becoming evident and meaningful. He then stops when he feels the time is right. The result is the honest and playful journey that forms the recent series of works seen here, which could be considered as falling into a genre that’s referred to as 'surrealist automatism' or ‘automatic drawing’, where marks are made without consciousness.
Having been around many high-end works at Hirst’s studio during his time there, James saw the importance of attention to detail, finish and presentation, and this is reflected in these high quality pieces, perfectly displayed in identical box frames. And it’s this juxtaposition of the free, unsupervised mark-making paired with the structured identical format of the canvases (a subconscious association to identical twins perhaps?), the use of the same colour palette and their high finished perfection that makes these works so alluring.
The final part, or should I say the next piece of this puzzle that James’ career is forming, is that he is now being represented by Eyestorm, the creators of the first Damien Hirst spot prints back in 2000. Whether this was a conscious decision by James when he applied to show his work with us or an unconscious (or oblivious) one, I think I prefer not to know.
See all the new paintings
here.