Robert Hunter

Robert Hunter was born in 1947 in Melbourne. He died in 2014. A leading exponent of late modernist abstraction, Hunter came to prominence in the late 1960s and was best known for his consideration and expansion of American minimalism, in particular colour field painting. From the time of his first solo exhibition in 1967, Robert Hunter worked with the grid. Defined by slightly raised edges along the painting’s surface, his grids articulate sequences of close tonal relationships in shades of white and grey.

Hunter’s exploration of shade, tone, colour and texture steadily evolved throughout his career. Inspired by the all-white paintings of Kazimir Malevich and Robert Rauschenberg, Hunter initially worked with white-on-white, before experimenting with tones of grey and the silver, and the addition of visible, primary-coloured cotton threads imbedded into the paint. Returning to all-white, Hunter continued to experiment the potential of tonality, through the introduction of tints of red, blue, yellow, and green. Following his residency at Melbourne University in the 1970s, Hunter incorporated inconsistent surface textures into his grid-sequences, using different paint rollers to apply commercially produced house-paints to the grid. In the late 2000s, Hunter began creating varying degrees of matte and shine in his paintings through the introduction of various additives, resulting in a subtle but complex pattern of intricate geometric shapes and sequences.