Richard Hunt considers Hero Construction to be one of the most important works of his early career. It reflects an interest in mythology the young artist had when he made this sculpture. As Hunt recalled, “I was creating two tensions in the piece: one between the modern methods of construction and the ancient imagery; and the other between the anatomical and the machinelike qualities of the sculpture.” 19

For the last forty years, Hunt has enjoyed widespread success, with his works adorning public spaces and private collections in his home state of Illinois and around the world. After receiving a degree in art education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1957, Hunt gained national recognition with his first one-person exhibition at the Alan Gallery in New York the following year. The museum acquired Hero Construction in 1958 through the museum’s first curator of modern art, Katharine Kuh, who had recognized Hunt’s talent when he was a student. Kuh arranged for the collector Arnold H. Maremont to purchase Hero Construction for donation to the museum.

The geometric qualities and reductive forms of Hero Construction reflect the many artistic traditions that have inspired the sculptor. He has studied everything from Cubism and African smelting techniques to Native American art and the art of innovative sculptors such as Spaniards Julio Gonzalez and Pablo Picasso and the American David Smith, many of whose works he saw for the first time in the exhibition “Sculpture of the Twentieth Century” at the Art Institute in 1953. Hunt’s goal in this piece, as he has put it, was to “develop the kind of forms Nature might create if only heat and steel were available to her.” 20 (KNP)