Steve Hurd

Steve Hurd (born 1956) is an American visual artist who creates paintings that transform found source materials to critically examine consumer culture, mass media, and sociopolitical issues, lives in Los Angeles.

Early life and education Born at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., in 1956, Hurd's early life was marked by frequent moves due to his father's career as a U.S. Army military officer and physician. In the 1960s, his family relocated to San Francisco when his father was stationed at Letterman Army Hospital on the Presidio military base during the Vietnam War. This period significantly impacted Hurd, as he observed the wounded returning from the war and the San Francisco counterculture and protest movement's resistance, leading him to grapple with conflicting emotions. He struggled to reconcile the political aspects of the war with his admiration for his father's military service. These complex feelings later influenced his approach to art, culminating in his R.I.P. painting series, which both criticized the Iraq War and honored the fallen soldiers.

Hurd earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in 1979. Subsequently, he pursued graduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he studied with Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, and Mike Kelley. He was awarded a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in the New Genres Department (UCLA) in 1988.

Hurd's paintings employ a loosely naturalistic, drippy oil paint or adopt a blocky, painterly pixelation reminiscent of early computer graphics to reinterpret found source materials such as advertising flyers, magazine covers, art reviews, product logos, news photos, and his own agitated scribblings. This approach to painting plays a key role in Hurd's investigation into the nature of images and representation, offering a critique of contemporary society and serving as a methodical exploration of painting itself, reminding viewers that they are looking at a painted object.

Artworks and projects

Women's Day & Family Circle magazine covers, a series of drippy paintings from 1996 to 2022, were fertile ground for Hurd's critical commentary on mass media and domestic life. These covers, with their visual overload and overt commercialization of guilty pleasures and cultural anxieties, employed bold text to further manipulate readers into buying back their own hopes, fears, and dreams. Examples include phrases like "Could your pet be making you sick?", "How your dreams can solve your problems", and "How real women find the time to exercise!" all while prominently featuring images of extravagant cakes and cookies alongside splashy written phrases such as "Desserts your family will love!" With their runny washes and drips, Hurd's women's magazine paintings produce a fluid denigration of their subject matter. Transforming the content into a visceral experience that invites a second look at what these magazines are promoting. Should Never Be Exhibited, 2006 Frequently, Hurd adopts a critical and sarcastic stance towards figures of authority. In 1996, after receiving a negative review of his exhibition in the LA Times, he created a wall-sized painting entitled Safe Passage, depicting the entire newspaper section featuring everything on the page, including his review. Utilizing his drippy paint technique, he blurred and dissolved the text, then incorporated trompe l'oeil renderings of malt liquor bottles along the periphery of the newspaper's layout. The Times critic had stated Hurd’s paintings “are as empty as its throwaway subject matter,” giving Hurd the idea to paint what he considered an empty review. As literary and media theorist Laurence A. Rickels put it, "Hurd remakes the LA Times journalist’s judgment upon the show before-that his work is empty just like its throwaway subject matter-into a performative self-sentence, thereby raising the newspaper phrase as it destroys itself towards the power of writing”. In these works Hurd turns the tables on those in charge by using the power of paint, displaying artistic independence, and exposing the weaknesses of their arguments, all while refusing to submit to authority. In a separate piece titled, Should Never Be Exhibited 2006, serving as an introduction to Hurd’s exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, he transcribed a supervisor's letter of reprimand in paint, concerning his communication skills—deemed offensive and disrespectful—into what curator/critic Christopher Bedford called a "dripping, sardonic script." Snuggled Snuggle, 1999, 30' x 12' multi-paneled, free-standing, acrylic emulsion on shaped canvas.

While some of Hurd's paintings may initially seem familiar or humorous, such as Snuggled Snuggle—a 30-by-12-foot, multi-paneled, free-standing cutout of a well-known fabric softener's logo that incorporates its name, which he arranged to snuggle itself, his work can challenge how images are perceived by encouraging viewers to re-examine previously "understood" imagery. Hurd's painterly alterations introduce additional visual layers of meaning, thereby increasing the impact of disturbing or sensitive images, as seen in his R.I.P. series of 2008, which features chunky pixelated paintings based on photographs of flag-draped coffins returning to the United States from the Iraq War. By hand-painting the mechanical reproduction of the digitized image, Hurd imbues the picture with a human quality, serving as a metaphor for how individual soldiers retain their inherent humanity despite being part of an automated system. The R.I.P. series is not only meant to honor the Fallen Soldiers, but point out the mistakes of war, as Hurd puts it, “You’re seeing the flag on the coffin. It’s about the country going down, besides the individual. The flag is on the coffin, and the coffin’s going in the ground. And that’s America. They’re not just burying the soldiers. The pallbearers are burying America.” The Foundation Art Resources (FAR) had awarded Hurd funding to create a public artwork in the park. As a protest against Jesse Helms's efforts to defund the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for what Helms called obscene art, Hurd chose to conceal his artwork from the public and placed the commissioned piece under one of the park's many picnic benches. and the 2005 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship. , The Frederick R Weisman Art Foundation Collection, and The Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara.