Robert Hunter

Robert Hunter, like cer­tain oth­er Min­i­mal­ists… was attract­ed by seri­alised mod­u­lar sys­tems, which involve method­i­cal rep­e­ti­tion. Such sys­tems cre­ate a suc­ces­sion of com­po­nents in an art work, each linked direct­ly to the one that has gone before, gen­er­at­ing a struc­ture that seems to be deter­mined pri­mar­i­ly by log­ic, rather than through aes­thet­ic deci­sion. Seri­al­i­ty of this kind is found in many tra­di­tion­al art forms: in music, in the fugues of J. S. Bach, with their com­plex rep­e­ti­tions; in poet­ry, in such verse forms as the crown (where the first line of each stan­za repeats the last line of the stan­za imme­di­ate­ly before it) and the vil­lanelle (where iden­ti­cal lines are repeat­ed with vary­ing effect in vary­ing stan­za­ic posi­tions). Hunter dis­cov­ered the ser­i­al com­po­nents for his own work in the lin­ear grids and square mod­ules which formed part of the vocab­u­lary of Min­i­mal art, though his adop­tion of these pat­terns may have been as much instinc­tu­al as con­scious. I can­not think of any­thing in par­tic­u­lar that led me to grids and mod­ules, he has said, I knew noth­ing much at the time, and it seemed to me that this was a good start­ing point; a noth­ing point.

- from Grazia Gunn, A noth­ing point: The paint­ings of Robert Hunter, Anna Schwartz Gallery, 2007