Michael Hurson

Michael Hurson was at the forefront of artists creating a newfound relevance for figurative art in the early 1980s. His fanciful, cartoonish drawings reject the austerity of post-minimalism while seriously questioning the mechanisms of perception. Related is Hurson's lifelong involvement and fascination with theater, an artistic platform that by definition thematizes the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, history and myth, the readily believable and the nonsensical. Early in his career Hurson toyed with scale by producing painstakingly detailed miniature furnished interiors out of balsa wood. In his works on paper, for which he is best known, the artist developed a style that combined Pop art and cubist tendencies, transforming inanimate objects into anthropomorphized characters. For example, at the 1978 Whitney Museum exhibition New Image Painting, Hurson contributed a series of drawings of eyeglasses that had sprouted legs, dancing whimsically upon otherwise blank sheets of paper. In the 1990s, he further developed this signature style, but turned to iconic European paintings as sources of inspiration.

His works have been exhibited at renowned institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.