WELLESLEY, MASS.- A long-overlooked voice in postwar American art, Robert Huot (b. 1935) is receiving renewed attention for his radical redefinition of painting in the 1960s. Working at the intersection of hard-edge abstraction, minimalism, and conceptual art, Huot’s experimental practice challenged the formalist orthodoxy of his time and paved the way for a reimagining of the medium’s possibilities.

Emerging at a time when painting was grappling with the dominance of post-painterly abstraction and Clement Greenberg’s modernist doctrines, Huot reoriented the pictorial medium through geometric structures, shaped canvases, and spatially-aware compositions. Beginning in 1962, he created works that emphasized the objecthood and materiality of painting.

In 1965, Donald Judd compared Huot’s work to Ellsworth Kelly’s, and that same year Barbara Rose featured him in her seminal “ABC Art” essay, aligning him with early minimalism. Major exhibitions followed, including Systemic Painting at the Guggenheim (1966), The Art of the Real at MoMA (1969), and Modular Painting at the Albright-Knox (1970). Yet Huot’s pivotal artistic shift occurred even earlier. In 1963, he collaborated with Robert Morris and La Monte Young on War, a performance at Judson Memorial Church in New York City. There, Huot designed a wearable canvas shield, signaling a break from painting’s traditional wall-bound role and introducing a new, performative dimension to the medium.

Huot’s early object-like works such as Blue, Red (1962) and Yellow, Red (1962) used unconventional depth, taped edges, and disruptive patterning to explore perceptual ambiguity and the boundaries between image and object. He extended his compositions around and beyond the canvas edges, anticipating strategies later employed by Jo Baer and César Paternosto. His “anti-sculpture sculptures” like Andean Cross (1964) exhibited in Anne Goldstein’s 2004 LA MOCA exhibition titled A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958 – 1968 further dissolved the divide between painting and sculpture, asserting presence over image.

By the late 1960s, Huot’s radical minimalism gave way to even more conceptual approaches. Works like T’s Nylon (1968) and Stretched and Leaning (1968) stripped away pigment and compositional elements entirely, leaving only the stretcher or fabric—a pointed commentary on the very nature of painting itself. As filmmaker Hollis Frampton noted, Huot took “an acute personal interest in the question: How much may be discarded and a work of art still remain?”

Despite solo shows at Stephen Radich Gallery and participation in critical exhibitions, Huot withdrew from the commercial art world by the end of the decade. His final project, co-organized with Lucy Lippard in 1968 at Paula Cooper Gallery, marked a decisive political and artistic turn. In 1969, he left New York City for a rural life with his then-wife, choreographer Twyla Tharp, turning to film and diary-based art.

Today, as art historians and institutions reassess the histories of minimalism, conceptualism, and post-painterly abstraction, Huot’s contributions stand out as a vital, missing link. His boundary-defying works offer a compelling narrative of painting’s transformation during one of its most volatile eras.

View the exhibition at www.davidhallgallery.com. An illustrated catalog has been published to accompany the show and is available through the gallery.