Hunt Slonem — Paintings For Sale

Hunt Slonem is one of the most consistently collected American painters working today, with work held in over 250 museum collections including the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney. His subject matter is deceptively simple. What he does with it is not.

His three defining series — bunnies, birds, and butterflies — each began from a place of genuine obsession rather than artistic strategy. Slonem is a painter who lives inside his subject matter. His Manhattan studio houses an aviary of 40 to 70 exotic rescued birds at any given time. His rabbit paintings began as a personal reckoning with the Chinese zodiac. His butterfly canvases glow with the attention of someone who has looked at wings long enough to understand what they carry. That authenticity is legible in every canvas, and it is precisely what collectors respond to.

The rabbit paintings, which Slonem began in the early 1980s after discovering that 1951, the year of his birth, was the year of the Rabbit in the Chinese zodiac, function less as portraiture and more as mantra. The repeated imagery is an act akin to spiritual meditation, each canvas asking the same question slightly differently. Rendered in thick, gestural strokes against richly colored or gilded grounds, these are not decorative objects. They are accumulations of energy, and the repetition is entirely the point.

The bird paintings draw directly from the aviary that surrounds him daily. His lavishly colored canvases are populated with rows of birds built up through thick, expressive brushwork, the wet-on-wet technique creating crosshatched surfaces that blur the subject and foreground the act of painting itself. Birds and butterflies, Slonem has said, serve as his visual metaphor for consciousness, spirit, and soul. The canvases feel alive because they are made by someone surrounded by living things.

The butterfly works offer perhaps the most immediate entry point into his practice. Rendered with a luminosity reminiscent of stained glass against gold and jewel-toned grounds, they read simultaneously as scientific specimen and pure abstraction. Color that holds a room. A surface that rewards close looking.

Across all three series, what Slonem offers the collector is rare: a practice rooted in obsession rather than trend, a visual language entirely his own, and a body of work that has only deepened in institutional and market standing over five decades. His paintings are in the rooms of the Guggenheim and on the walls of private collectors who return to his work again and again.