
Collection Online as of December 1, 2023
(American, b. 1935)
Welded corten steel
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Dorsky 1984.191
© Richard Hunt
not on view
Firebird exemplifies Hunt’s intent to "develop the kind of forms nature might create if only heat and steel were available to her." The title Firebird evokes the phoenix, the bird rising out of the ashes, mythologized across civilizations, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Informed by 20th-century abstract art, however, Hunt derives his subject matter not only from myth but from universal experience, the "observation of the form and spatial contents of organic and machine structures, [and] the implications of image and emotion."