Looking at a painting by Colin Hunt is like watching someone pass through a hole in our consciousness. As the landscape refracts through the sitter’s absence and fills that emptiness, the world remakes itself in the image of what has been lost. For the artist, these human-shaped portals operate between here and the hereafter, providing sublime solace in the shared human experience of grief. Hunt collapses the concepts of sitter and likeness, space and time by connecting the formal traditions of portraiture and American landscape painting. The resulting panels explore a collective intuition enveloping memory, humanity and the afterlife. These themes may be heavy, but Hunt’s paintings are tender and optimistic. The people we love and lose are always with us, absorbed and refreshed in the spaces we inhabit.

Colin Hunt (b. 1973) received his MFA from Columbia University and his BFA from Cooper Union, both in New York. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in numerous museums and galleries, including the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX; Teckningmuseet, Laholm, Sweden; The Brooklyn Museum, NY; The National Academy of Design, New York, NY; Triumph Gallery, Moscow, Russia; Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, NY; Artist Space, New York, NY; White Columns, New York, NY; and Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA. In 2011, he was the inaugural resident at the Galveston Artist Residency in Galveston, TX. His work has been featured and/or reviewed in a number of publications including New American Paintings, The Brooklyn Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. The artist is based in Brooklyn, NY and Maine.