Elliott Hundley: Everyday, Every Day

Everyday, Every Day identifies drawing as the primary undercurrent in Hundley’s daily practice. Much like the approach shared by Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist figures of the 20th century, drawing has acted as an entry point and sustaining creative process in Hundley’s work for over a decade. Here, paintings and works on paper demonstrate these generative explorations, employing a distinctive line that is by turns gestural and expansive, tightly-rendered, illustrative, and used to generate kaleidoscopic patterns. Art critic Doug Harvey describes these “old school oil-on-canvas” paintings that have acted as companions to Hundley’s more materially complex three-dimensional canvases as “unabashedly sentimental accumulations of impasto calligraphy and luminous stains.” Elsewhere in the exhibition, the line all but dissolves into compositions of impressionistic painterliness (Untitled, 2014) or is partially obscured by Hundley’s extrapolation of the picture plane using encaustic and pins (16.8.23.1, 2023).

Though primarily utilizing techniques of abstraction, these works feature fragmented details of figures and collaged elements of appropriated imagery, including a stamp collection Hundley inherited from his great-grandfather. Hundley routinely draws from his extensive archive of accumulated materials and photographic images—a process inherently invested in themes of time and memory that enables the artist to traverse the many formal, conceptual, and emotional possibilities of collage and assemblage. This use of what he calls “image-objects” from the past builds a connective tissue between generations of image-makers and collectors, inviting onlookers to speculate on the narrative possibilities that the works embody.

Expanding these considerations into three-dimensions, Hundley presents a series of ceramic vessels alongside two new, large-scale sculptures that occupy the center of the gallery space. The ceramics bear painted glazes, marked by the line, that mirror the artist’s drawings. The totemic forms of Palette 5 and Palette 6 (both 2023) are rendered from—and shrouded in—materials such as concrete, metal, plastic, wire, rope, wood, feathers, fabric, plaster, and faux fur. The artist’s long-running engagement with the theater and its themes of representation and illusion are further developed in these works—while their verticality and concrete pedestals engage with traditions of classical sculpture, their adornment creates a highly-textured surface more reminiscent of costume, an association developed by the fixture of caster wheels at the base that recall easily-maneuverable stage props.