Adulthood trains us out of wonder. Animals are reduced to species, color to taste, recurrence to branding; delight—the most suspicious pleasure of all—is treated as though it requires an apology. Hunt Slonem has spent his career refusing that impoverishment. In his hands, a hare is never merely itself, pink declines to behave quietly, and beauty never distracts from thought. It carries us directly into it.
At One Art Space in Tribeca, Through the Looking Glass, curated by MaryAnn Giella McCulloh, assembled Slonem’s rabbits, butterflies, birds, and sculptures into an exhibition that initially appeared buoyant. Gradually, however, something more intimate disclosed itself. The menagerie offered no retreat from reality. Its abundance, fragility, and near-devotional rhythm posed a more unsettling question: When did tenderness become so difficult to take seriously?
The title, of course, invokes Lewis Carroll’s 1871 novel, where a mirror opens onto a realm in which familiar logic forfeits its authority. Language reverses, ordinary rules unfasten, and Alice advances from pawn to queen. The artist inherits that spirit of transformation. Within this reflected universe, supposedly minor subjects assume monumental consequence, multiplicity generates individuality, and pleasure functions as inquiry.
The bunny bore symbolic baggage long before Carroll gave one an appointment. Across civilizations, the long-eared creature has signified fertility, lunar mystery, vulnerability, resurrection, and immortality. Buddhist narratives place a selfless animal upon the moon; Chinese traditions associate its celestial counterpart with an elixir of eternal life; Dürer’s Young Hare transformed exacting observation into something approaching reverence. For Slonem, born in 1951—the Chinese Year of the Rabbit—the connection is also personal. Since the early 1980s, the motif has matured from subject into companion, glyph, and spiritual proxy.
Viewed accordingly, Blue Hutch (2025), a modestly scaled oil on wood, possesses remarkable emotional concentration. Numerous silhouettes gather against an intense blue ground within a structure suggesting refuge without erasing independence. Every figure belongs to the group yet remains subtly singular. One first sees a pattern; eventually, temperaments emerge. More tenderly, we preserve photographs and retell beloved stories not from a failure of imagination, but from affection’s instinct to repeat itself. Perhaps ritual is simply how devotion remembers where to return.
Twentieth-century seriality, certainly, carries the shadow of mechanical reproduction. Warhol multiplied icons until celebrity and commodity nearly merged, while Minimalism employed iteration to restrain the expressive dominance of the artist’s hand. Slonem travels somewhere warmer. His brush retains irregularity, touch, and minute shifts in character. Rather than emptying the composition of significance, accumulation begins to resemble prayer.
Across the room, Pink Ascension (2021) stretched across 77 by 101 inches. Butterflies drifted through a luminous rose field until the canvas became atmosphere, their spacing establishing a visual tempo of gathering, dispersal, and release. In Greek thought, psyche refers to both soul and butterfly, joining bodily metamorphosis to the mystery of consciousness. That inheritance hums beneath the surface without becoming literal. These delicate lifeforms exist briefly, birds vanish into distance, and rabbits survive through vigilance. Beneath the radiance lies an understanding that splendor is inseparable from impermanence. Color does not deny mortality; it makes what remains feel more precious.
The painter is, unmistakably, everywhere—and with good reason. His visual language inhabits museum collections, restored houses, public settings, and private rooms because its immediacy never exhausts the possibility of discovery. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney hold his paintings, yet this extraordinary reach extends far beyond institutional approval. Critical establishments occasionally treat popularity as evidence against profundity, as though affection at scale invalidated rigor. Slonem overturns that snobbery rather magnificently. He retained Neo-Expressionism’s physical brushwork while directing its force toward nature, mysticism, and attachment, proving that seriousness need not arrive dressed in gray.
McCulloh’s curation allowed this argument to unfurl through shifts in scale, density, and medium. Compact compositions answered atmospheric expanses, revealing a vocabulary elastic enough to remain recognizable without becoming static. Ultimately, Through the Looking Glass did not ask us to believe that bunnies had suddenly acquired depth. It reminded us that they had never been frivolous. We had merely forgotten how much longing, fear, and faith the smallest living form can hold.
Slonem’s achievement is not to restore wonder as childish innocence, but to establish it as a rigorous form of perception. His creatures expose the arrogance that mistakes familiarity for simplicity, reminding us that delight, properly examined, can be every bit as intellectually demanding as despair.
