Alexis Hunter

Biography

Ten black-and-white photographs mounted in two rows on two boards. The shadow of a woman's hand falls on a naked male body and gradually smears it with black paint, starting at the groin. This is “Approach to Fear XVII: Masculinisation of Society” of 1977; Tate bought the series in 2021.

Hunter was twenty-eight at the time, and in her fifth year in London.

She was born on 4 November 1948 in Auckland, into a family that had moved to New Zealand from Sydney the year before; her twin sister Alyson became a printmaker and photographer. She grew up in Titirangi, among the Waitākere hills on the edge of Auckland. From 1966 to 1969 Hunter studied at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland; her tutor was Colin McCahon, from whom she took a simple idea: the artist answers to society like any other member of it. In 1971 she gained a diploma to teach art and history, and in 1972 she left for London, where her sister was already living. She earned her living in animation and advertising; even some big films are named in which she had a hand, but how large her share in them was is hard to say. The main thing was happening elsewhere: from 1972 to 1975 she belonged to the Women's Workshop of the Artists' Union, alongside Mary Kelly, Margaret Harrison and Tina Keane, and then to the Women's Free Arts Alliance. “We were ridiculed in the press. We couldn't get work,” she recalled of those years; photo labs refused to print her pictures.

Her material in the seventies was the photographic sequence, almost always with hands in the leading role. For “Sexual Rapport” (1972–1976) she photographed men in the streets of Hoxton and of New York's Little Italy: workers on their lunch break, policemen, all quite good-natured, and then marked the prints “Yes”, “No” or “Maybe”. In “Sexual Warfare” (1975) her own hands demonstrate ways of dealing with a partner: beneath a clutched pair of scissors runs the caption “Castrate, dedicated to Delilah”, and beside it a hand holds the manual “How to Make It in a Man's World” under the word “Compete”. In one of the “Approach to Fear” series (1976) well-kept hands get steadily dirtier with the oil and grease of engine parts; in another, of 1977, red varnish is removed from the nails and the nails are cut with a razor blade; in “Approach to Fear XIII: Pain – Destruction of Cause” of the same year a woman sets fire to a silver high-heeled shoe. In “The Marxist Wife (Still Does the Housework)” (1978) a manicured hand wipes a poster of Karl Marx. “Identity Crisis” is assembled from six portraits of her, taken over two weeks by six different people: from a pearl necklace to a hard hat. Lucy Lippard observed in 1981 that Hunter takes advertising's favourite motif, the disembodied hand, and turns it inside out. To my mind, it cannot be put more precisely.

In 1978 Sarah Kent, then Exhibitions Director at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, showed her “Approaches to Fear” there. That year Hunter took part in the Hayward Annual, in 1979 she exhibited at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and in 1981 in the summer show at the Serpentine Gallery. In the early eighties she returned to painting in order, as she explained, to get to grips with the political difficulties of that medium itself and to speak about psychology and fantasy from a feminist position; in the canvases of these years a muse appears, demonic and lustful. In 1986 she was visiting professor of painting and photography at the University of Houston, and in 1989 the Auckland City Art Gallery assembled her survey exhibition “Fears/Dreams/Desires”, covering 1976–1988.

In the early 2000s Hunter joined the Stuckists, the British movement for figurative painting; her contribution was canvases in which a Symbolist atmosphere was combined with a Neo-Expressionist gesture and an ironic imitation of the manner of famous male painters. In 2008 she founded the Camden Stuckists group.

Interest in early feminist art returned in the mid-2000s. In 2006 her exhibition “Radical Feminism in the 1970s” opened in Norwich and was later shown in Auckland; Kathy Battista wrote in Frieze that the show secured Hunter's place in the British feminist movement. She herself put it more simply: in the seventies we felt we could change society, and thought we would do it by making art. In 2007 her work was included in the exhibition WACK! at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and in 2013 Tate bought “Approach to Fear XIII”. She lived and worked in London and in the French village of Beaurainville in the Pas-de-Calais. She died on 24 February 2014 in London.

Her archive is administered by the Alexis Hunter Trust. In 2023–2024 Hunter's work was shown at Tate Britain in the exhibition “Women in Revolt!”, and in 2024 the Richard Saltoun Gallery in London staged a large solo exhibition, “Ten Seconds”. Her work is held by Tate, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the Te Papa museum in Wellington and the Arts Council of Great Britain collection.