My Exhibitions
Catalogues from some of my exhibitions are illustrated below together with commentaries about the works shown. Each catalogue can be downloaded and viewed as a pdf.
My Exhibition catalogues
Duality
2016, Galerie Listros, Berlin
“Margaret Hunter’s persona has been strongly influenced by sometimes conflicting demands: an art career in Berlin and a family in Scotland; a life in West Berlin at a time of dynamic change in the city as East and West were joined; a need to study but little knowledge of the language: Duality.”
re-inventions
2014, aquabitArt, Berlin
“For Margaret Hunter, line has always been very important; it is the connection between her charcoal drawings and the scratched marks that she sometimes makes into the thick paint of her pictures. The "re-invention" was to interpret certain symbolic forms or elements using new materials and techniques.”
Stepping Places
2013, Art First, London
“Hunter’s visual thinking often begins in her spontaneous, expressionist drawings. Charcoal predominates, suggesting at once her long held interest in African art and culture, first encountered during her impressionable childhood when living in Nigeria. Combined with selected observations from the everyday, there is a reflective quality here as places and experiences are reassessed and renewed from earlier works.”
Bunch of Person
2006, Art First, London
“Hunter has a store of personal symbolic forms from which she draws almost unconsciously. These shapes are endlessly variable, changing and evolving with time and circumstance; some will lie fallow then re-emerge unbidden. An oblique, abstracted language such as hers holds us at a distance at the same time as it fascinates and intrigues, endlessly provoking imaginative speculation.”
Thinking Through The Body
2004, Umweltbundesamt, Berlin
“The paintings in the exhibition are rich in allusions and offer a metaphor for the spoken word. For all that is said there is much that is inexpressible. As in speech, the meaning is expressed by different stresses and intonations. The idea of attachment and belonging is an important theme that runs through this group of sculptures, making and maintaining contact in a variety of contexts.”
Lines of Continuity
2002, Art First, London
“Hunter's expressionism and her academic training provide her with an invaluable counterpoint that never fails to enliven her composition, charging it with intensity while pulling it through a filter of refinement and sophisticated nuances of meaning.”
Bodies of Substance
2002, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh University & Galerie M, Marzahn, Berlin
“I have often been asked, why I concentrate on the female figure as principal symbol in my paintings and sculptures? To me the answer is obvious: I have gained my life experience as woman. This wealth of experience informs my themes without me saying that I am going to produce images as a woman.”
Intercessions
2001-2 touring exhibition
Collins Gallery, Strathclyde University Glasgow; Vennel Gallery, Irvine; Tweeddale Museum, Peebles
“Hunter’s approach to her work is intuitive but her intuition works in collaboration with a rigorous critical and analytical understanding of the art of painting. The tension between two ways of working and thinking, intuitive and intellectual, is embedded in the work, as Hunter strives to preserve the energy and internal dynamic while also achieving clarity and resolution.”
Elemental Traces
2000, Art First, London
“Margaret Hunter's continuous subject resides in the connection between the internal world of her own experience, of living across geographical and cultural boundaries, and the external conditions presented by the social, historical and political realities of contemporary Europe.”
Tangents
1998, International Cultural Centre, Cracow, Poland
“Her palette is earthy, expressive in itself of a desire to engage with nature. Her sculptures too are made largely from the bare wood of a tree, sometimes in its entirety. Conjuring her image - with brush or chisel - she has about her something of the shaman and in the best tradition of western primitive art the marks made with emphatic scratching into the surface of the paint or on the wood become charged with an almost magical power.”
Vital Patterns
1998, Art First, London
“Margaret Hunter has come a long way on her unlikely voyage of exploration, and the journey is by no means over; in her case, both journey and arrival matter. Drawing, painting and sculpture are always developments of the same idea, flowing from one medium to the other in dynamic, osmotic progression.”
Scratching The Surface
1994, Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London
“In her paintings, Hunter often scrapes back, reworks, in the effort to achieve clarity and remain true to her intuitive search for form. It is this activity no less than the shadowy presences which people the backgrounds of her paintings, which generates the sense of animation in her work.”
Changing Places
1991-2, touring exhibition
Collins Gallery, Strathclyde University; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh University; the Arts Centre, Darlington, England; Galerie M, Berlin: Kunstverein Weinheim, Germany; Vanessa Devereux Gallery, London
“The work in this exhibition relates to Berlin and beyond. Hunter's preoccupation with the uncertainties of reunification is made manifest. All of the paintings contain allusions and iconographic references to the disruption of stability reunification has brought about.”
Paintings and Drawings
1990, Vanessa Devereux Gallery, London
“Margaret Hunter’s imaginative transformation of reality, linking the particular with the universal is a very special and unique achievement and surely reveals her as an artist capable of transcending traditional conventions in her intuitive quest for an art of inner meaning and spiritual renewal.”
“Margaret Hunter’s art reminds us how to feel with our eyes, as well as to see. Her work makes its viewers think further, think differently and think again.”
Prof Rachel Jones
Department of Philosophy, University of Dundee
“Her images contain an energy that denotes the positive power in change as well as its disruptions, its expanding openness as well as its explosions.”
Christopher Andreae
Art Critic, Writer
“Hunter’s energy and confidence come from an inner strength, and a consistent, singular vision, honed and tested within her two home countries, Scotland and Germany.”
Clare Cooper
Art Historian, Gallerist Art First (London)
Exhibitions
A selection
Please refer to the following list for a selection of my group and solo exhibitions.
