Elliott Hundley

"Hundley creates visually spectacular works of art. He does so not by pumping up the production values of his studio practice but by filtering moments of myth through the people, pictures, and material stuff of everyday life."—Richard Meyer

The gradual accumulation of imagery for an initially undetermined use is a critical element of the artist’s process. At his studio in Los Angeles, Hundley presides over a vast archive of two-and three-dimensional found materials collated from books, magazines, and establishments in his local neighborhood. Categorized alphabetically and according to color or mood, these materials are brought into dialogue with Hundley’s own photography of his family and friends, whom the artist dresses and directs as if characters from a play. While some are evidently protagonists, constituting a focal point on the canvas, others lay among dense folds of visual information, assuming the role of a face in a crowd or phantom figures arising from unknowable depths.  

Hundley leverages an abiding knowledge of classical mythology and literature to weave a fabric of allusions, informing projects such as his 2011 solo exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, which travelled to the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, and took on the Ancient Greek tragedy The Bacchae by Euripides as its subject matter. In 2006, the artist’s installation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, referenced Greek figures Aphrodite, Meddea, and Penelope, and 2016-17, Hundley presented solo exhibitions based on Antonin Artaud’s surrealist 1933 play There Is No More Firmament. His first solo exhibition at Kasmin, which opened in September 2021, took its inspiration from Jean Genet’s 1957 play The Balcony.