The Grenning Gallery is pleased to announce our third annual Hunt Slonem Solo Exhibition, Opening Thursday June 25th at 26 Main Street, Sag Harbor, NY, 11963. Please join us at our Opening Reception Thursday evening, from 6:30 – 8:00pm; the artist will be in attendance. The exhibition will hang through Sunday July 19th.
Hunt Slonem returns to Grenning with varying configurations of his iconic bunnies. He, of course, elaborates on this subject in various colors, sizes and compositions. These simple flick-of-the-wrist rabbits have become synonymous with Hunt Slonem – some say it’s his signature motif. These bunnies often sit atop one another, squeezing together tightly as if in anticipation for a family photograph. Although repetition is clearly a vessel for Slonem’s creative output, each bunny embodies its own individual identity.
This year, Slonem delivers “Fluffle 3 with Butterflies”, a large golden canvas chock-full of bunny rabbits and white butterflies. This pairing of bunnies and butterflies creates a kind of spiritual duality – earthly luck, abundance, and fertility (the rabbit) alongside transcendence and transformation (the butterfly). The widespread use of repetition by Slonem is a form of creative meditation that unlocks subconscious sentiment, so the combination of these two symbols isn’t decorative so much as it is devotional.
The largest painting this year, however, does not feature Slonem’s signature motif – instead, a family of owls amongst the trees. Unlike Slonem's bunnies, which multiply in cheerful chorus, these owls preside. A parliament of mixed species — great horned, barred, and beyond — emerges from a silver ground that glows like pooled moonlight, the forest rendered in urgent strokes of black and blue. The composition is dense but not frantic; each owl holds its place with a stillness that feels ancient. In many traditions, the owl is a keeper of hidden knowledge, a creature at home in the space between worlds. Here, they seem utterly unbothered by our arrival.
In Monsoon Ascension II, Slonem captures transformation at its most literal — white butterflies rising through a curtain of falling rain. The canvas is built in layers: a silver ground cross-hatched with fine blue lines, then vertical streaks of deep navy dripping earthward, and finally the butterflies themselves, scattered at varying states of materialization. Some are fully rendered in white; others exist only as dark outlines, as if still deciding whether to arrive. The effect is of a world caught between states — between storm and stillness, between form and flight. Ascension, here, is not triumphant. It is quiet, inevitable, and ongoing.
A departure from Slonem’s usual menagerie, Blue Abraham Lincoln turns the same feverish brushwork toward portraiture. Rendered in cobalt and white against a brilliant blue ground, Lincoln emerges with startling presence — familiar yet newly alive, as if seen through the painter's own devotion. One of Slonem's most enduring portrait subjects, Lincoln — long regarded as an icon of moral integrity and principled leadership — feels especially resonant this year as America marks its 250th birthday. At an intimate 20 x 16 inches, the portrait carries the quality of a personal icon, something kept close.
Rounding out the exhibition, a selection of smaller works on panel — spanning bunnies, butterflies, owls, and monkeys across a vibrant range of colors and grounds — each one a concentrated expression of the same devotional energy that defines his larger canvases.
