Arnet’s Katya Kazakina just spoke with Hunter Biden, former lawyer and lobbyist (and son of the President) about his new vocation; artist.
“I don’t paint from emotion or feeling, which I think are both very ephemeral. For me, painting is much more about kind of trying to bring forth what is, I think, the universal truth.
The universal truth is that everything is connected and that there’s something that goes far beyond what is our five senses and that connects us all. The thing that really fascinates me is the connection between the macro and the micro, and how these patterns repeat themselves over and over.
It comes from a much deeper place. If you stand in front of a Rothko, the things that he evokes go far beyond the pain that Rothko was experiencing in his personal life at that moment.”
According to Artnet, he works
on canvas, metal, and Japanese Yupo paper, Biden’s artworks are often layered, with elements of photography, painting, collage, and poetry. Some are geometric abstractions, filled with patterns and somewhat hallucinogenic. Others depict trees, leaves, and body parts like outstretched arms.
Biden says he’s influenced by Carl Jung, Yayoi Kusama, Sean Scully, Mark Bradford, and David Hockney. He has no formal training, but has been making art throughout his dad’s last presidential campaign. He now has a dealer, Georges Bergès, a studio and a collector base with a solo show in the works. Bergès plans to host a private viewing for Biden in LA this fall, followed by an exhibition in NYC. Prices for this “emerging artist” go from $75,000 for works on paper to $500,000 for large-scale paintings.
Ambitious.
Bergès, Biden’s dealer, who operates galleries in New York and Berlin, was drawn to the honesty of Hunter’s work (Nothing to do with who his last name, I guess…?)
Bergès and Biden are tight. They speak as many as five times a day. Bergès says,
“It has that authenticity that I see in a lot of artists that I personally love, be it [Lucien] Freud or [Francis] Bacon. A lot of the issues that are thrown at Hunter is what makes him produce really great work.”
One such work is Biden’s self-portrait, which took two years to complete. He’s depicted as a silhouette, filled with colorful patterns that evoke sea organisms seen through a microscope. Behind him is the arc of a hill and a red disk in the sky. Looking closer, you see a few cursive lines of poetry, scribbled in gold on red:
All around him
beautiful things
tangled colors
cradled mercy
made real
rose up
and he began again
to write
a new story
The poem is related to Biden’s book, Beautiful Things: A Memoir, published in April. During the last six months of his brother’s life, Beau started to lose the capacity to speak, Biden recalled.
“One shorthand that he would use with me was he would say, ‘beautiful things, beautiful things.’ And it was a way for us to each tell each other to stay focused on the beautiful things in front of us. And the first beautiful thing in front of me was my brother.”
Asked what his dad thinks about his art, Hunter says,
“My dad loves everything that I do, and so. I’ll leave it at that.”
(Photos, Hunter Biden; via Artnet)