Hunt’s sculptures of bent steel tubing and welded sheet metal are magnets for association. The slightest change to the vantage point uproots them from car plant Detroit to the top floors of Chrysler Building Manhattan. The Minotaur who ran amok in an outsider artist’s rust studio turns into a hunting trophy in the white cube’s exaggerated pristine. Futurism’s sharpest forms soften at the forest’s edge, only to rise once more after an unstoppable fire.

The confidence with which Hunt moulded European Modernist neologisms into an American vernacular is remarkable. His language evolved by rejection at first. Hunt’s early sculptures comprised wood alongside the later metallic mainstays. By the 1960s, however, such soft matter gave way to an angular, inorganic austerity. In self-referential quotation, however, chromed steel, polished bronze, and the blackest of coppers are plenty expressive. Hunt’s legacy is a dictionary for self-determination written in phrases as they were being invented: lyrics, laudations, and litanies.