ALEXIS HUNTER

Chimera explores the distinctive visual mythology of Alexis Hunter’s paintings developed during the 1980s into a destabilizing psychological register. Birds, reptiles, mammals and half human hybrids, recognizable from Greco-Roman myth and legend, come together to form creatures that haunt urban landscapes and agitate at the edges of archetype.

Formed in the political climate of 1970s Britain, Hunter’s practice responded directly to the social realities of the Thatcher era. Growing up, Hunter observed that she developed “a bizarre imagination to cope with the hypocrisy of society.” After graduating from Elam School of Fine Art in Auckland in 1969, she moved to London and became deeply involved in the emerging British women’s movement. She initially used photographic sequences to center female perspective and experience, developing a language of warning signs and symbols. In the late 1970s, she returned to painting to “do new things with old forms,” joining Edward Totah Gallery in 1980, where she participated in ten exhibitions over six years. In the mid-1980s, while serving as Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Houston, Hunter absorbed influences from Mayan architecture and mythology.

Hunter’s work is characterized by powerful contradictory forces. The chimera is a female-coded entity straddling fantasy and reality which Hunter referenced frequently. A charged confluence of opposites; it was a portent of doom, but also of transformation. The exhibition spans four decades of Hunter’s practice, bringing together thirteen works from 1969 through the early 2000s. Red Dragon (1986) sits engulfed by flame, Conflict of the Psyche (1983–93) features a suspended dog with a fruit tree for a tail, and A Devil Considering a Dying Culture (1990) clutches blades of grass against a foreboding cityscape. The motherboard works, painted like talismans in oil on computer memory boards, are from the final series Hunter completed prior to her passing in 2014.

Chimera revisits paintings that were sites for personal, political, and allegorical stories to converge. The exhibition is realized with the support of the Alexis Hunter Estate, and curated by gallery Director Sophia McKinnon, a New Zealander long aware of Hunter’s work, who observes “the enduring potency of Hunter’s paintings comes from their irresolution – in constant motion, questioning states of being, inviting us into chaos and change.”

Alexis Hunter (b. 1948, Auckland, New Zealand – d. 2014, London, England) was recently included in the exhibition Women in Revolt!: Art, Activism and the Women’s movement in the UK 1970–1990 at Tate Britain and the National Galleries of Scotland (2024/25). She was included in WACK!, Art and The Feminist Revolution (2007-2008) at MOCA, Los Angeles, which traveled to MoMA P.S.1, New York; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; and Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada. No Such Thing As Society (2008) was organized by the British Arts Council and toured in collaboration with the Hayward Gallery. In 2018, Hunter was the solo subject of Sexual Warfare that inaugurated the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, and a major retrospective of her work was presented in 1989 at the Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand, entitled Alexis Hunter Fears/Dreams/Desires: A Survey Exhibition 1976-1988. Hunter was also included in the seminal exhibition curated by Lucy R. Lippard at the ICA in London, entitled Issue: Social Strategies by Women Artists (1980). Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, D.C.; Tate, London; the Arts Council of Great Britain; The Imperial War Museum, London; Museum of New Zealand (Te Papa Tongarewa), Wellington; The Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland; the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Edinburgh; the Sammlung Verbund Collection, Vienna; the Zurich Museum, Zurich; University of Cambridge, England; and University of Houston, Texas.