REPRODUCTIVE! Kenny Hunter

30 July – 24 September 2016
Monday – Saturday, 11am – 5pm

In his first major solo exhibition in Edinburgh since 2003 Kenny Hunter presents a series of new and reconfigured works at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, as part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2016.

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.

Download the file to 3-D print your own version of Kenny Hunter’s artwork, Migration of the Aura (Endless Edition), 2016.

For more on Kenny’s work see his profile on the GENERATION website

Kenny Hunter – Reproductive! Information Text – PDF

Photos by: Graeme Yule


Biography

Kenny Hunter (born 1962 in Edinburgh) studied for his BA (Hons) in Fine Art Sculpture at The Glasgow School of Art from 1983 to 1987. Selected public artworks include:The Unknown, Borgie Forest, Sutherland (2012); iGoat, Spitalfields, London (2010); and Citizen Firefighter, Central Station, Glasgow (2001). Solo exhibitions include A Shout in the Street, Tramway, Glasgow (2008) and Natural Selection, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2006). Group shows include What am I doing here?, Esbjerg Kunstmuseum, Denmark (2013) and Busan Biennale Sculpture Project,Korea (2013). Hunter is Programme Director of Sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art. He lives in Edinburgh.