Art: Un(der)known Pleasures- Richard Hull’s ‘Sleeping is Believing’ (1980)

Richard Hull's "Sleeping is Believing"

This is the first of what is intended as an ongoing series of posts focusing on works from the MCA Collection that are infrequently presented in our galleries. Not only do I hope to create greater visibility for particular artists and their works but also to demonstrate the remarkable, often untapped, depth of a museum’s permanent collection.

I seem to recall first seeing Richard Hull’s work at Chicago’s University Club, having been invited to a reception for a small show by my friend (and now internationally-renowned artist) Arturo Herrera. I greatly admired the balance of abstract and figurative elements in the painting by Hull that the Club had on view, as well as the accomplished and pleasingly harmonic use of color.

Possessing a somewhat more traditional format and approach than Herrera’s work, the painting nonetheless resonated with the minimal, sculptural forms of the latter, providing an equally sophisticated demonstration of how the legacy of Dada and Surrealism—particularly the more abstract artists such as Joan Miro and Jean Arp, or other figures such as Giorgio deChirico, Max Ernst, and Francis Picabia—could be reconsidered towards the end of the 20th Century.

A recent visit to the museum’s storage facility to assist a fellow colleague from a New York museum in his research for another artist’s show revealed Hull’s Sleeping is Believing from 1980.

Painted in oil on a wax ground, the work represents what appears to be a town or city street featuring buildings that are not recognizably domestic, commercial, or ecclesiastical. If anything, the imagery resembles nothing so much as a theatrical set or backdrop, a sensibility reinforced by the flat, planar rendering of the structures against a black background. In both the “positive” spaces of the buildings and the negative voids surrounding them, Hull creates subtle, almost ghostly lines (the grids in Disney’s futuristic 1982 film Tron come to mind), sometimes suggesting independent or ancillary architectural forms as well as silhouettes of more indistinct organic or human shapes. These more anthropomorphic presences are also seen in windows or other apertures in the building.

The punning title of the work—Sleeping is Believing—reinforces a connection to Surrealism in its allusion to the prospects and possibilities of the psychological unconscious. Hull’s use of a theatrical setting prompts consideration of how our dreams take the form of narratives (typically bizarre or fantastical ones) while provocatively suggesting in the title that perhaps those fictions possess a sense of truth and credibility.

I am planning to meet Hull for a walkthrough of his current exhibition at Western Exhibitions (at 119 N. Peoria St, Suite 2A , where it will remain on view through May 1st .)

"Night and Day" by Robert Hull

Having kept tabs on his more recent work through studio visits and by looking at the images on the gallery’s website online, it’s interesting to see both the development of Hull’s paintings into much more abstract explorations of anthropomorphic form, as well as the continuity in his handling of the medium and assured handling of color and composition. The spatial structuring of content of the older work has given way to no-less defined shapes suggesting symbol or sign-like forms that possess a much more fluid and almost rhythmic sensibility.  Like trading in a Robert Wilson production of a Philip Glass opera for a performance by the Art Ensemble of Chicago shot by Sharon Lockhart (not that the latter exists but … you get the point).

Regardless, one gets the sense that Hull still believes in the essential premise of Sleeping is Believing in the new work, that a release from the boundaries of the “conscious” world—through the activities of our unconscious through sleep or through a more automatic processes of production—remains a vital and necessary part of our lived experience.

Dominic Molon is Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art,  Chicago.