HUNT, Frances
Still Life Composition V (Painting)
Believing that fruit depicted on tomb walls
would become real in the afterlife and give the
hungry inhabitant something to feast on, the
Egyptians inaugurated the still life tradition in
painting. It endures to the present day.
By the early twentieth century, bowls of apples,
oranges and pears had become the testing
ground for new ideas about flattening pictorial
space for the Cubist artists Pablo Picasso,
Georges Braque and Juan Gris. Waikato-born
Frances Hunt follows their lead a half century
later, deconstructing a few wine bottles into a
tangle of geometric forms, planes and black
outlines in this excursion into Cubism.