NEW YORK, NY.- Kasmin announced representation of Elliott Hundley (b. 1975). The Los Angeles-based artist is known for expanding the traditional notions of collage and assemblage in a multidisciplinary practice of painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography that synthesizes ancient epics, futuristic narratives, and contemporary realities. The resulting works resemble theatrical landscapes that delve into the artist’s psyche, reflecting Hundley’s desire to create a new personal mythology.
To mark the announcement, an online viewing room, Elliott Hundley: Preface, is now live on the gallery website, presenting new paintings, sculpture, and works on paper. The artist’s first solo exhibition will go on view at Kasmin in September 2021, taking inspiration from Jean Genet’s 1957 play, The Balcony, a work fraught with explorations of power and desire. Concurrent with the exhibition, Hundley will unveil a new 40-ft mural as part of contemporary art triennial Prospect New Orleans.
Nick Olney, Partner and Managing Director at Kasmin, said, “Elliott has a masterful ability to build immersive worlds of complexly layered imagery brimming with literary and art-historical allusions. He’s constructed his own unique language by combining a scholarly sense of inquiry with an instinctive and varied use of materials, expressed through processes that are both meticulous and gestural. We are thrilled to be welcoming him to Kasmin’s growing roster of artists.”
Moving fluidly across media, the artist utilizes found materials as various as bamboo, polystyrene, steel, embroidered fabric, and ceramics. Works on canvas are constructed from layers of meticulously compiled source material and mixed-media elements affixed using industrial fabric pins, frequently shaped by painterly marks that recall the sweeping dynamism of gestural abstraction. Often, these works include text fragments, a boisterous medley of voices both literary and colloquial. The results evoke operatic backdrops, battle advancement maps, or montages of the eternal present. What, from a distance, appears as a tangled frenzy of color and form is revealed on closer inspection as a scrupulously organized ecosystem of smaller-scale components, much like a city seen from above in the darkness.
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 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, Medea, and Penelope, and 2016-17, Hundley presented solo exhibitions based on Antonin Artaud’s surrealist 1933 play There Is No More Firmament.
In 2019, Hundley inaugurated the exhibition series Open House at MOCA, Los Angeles, exploring how the visual and material logic of collage has informed artists in MOCA’s collection, as well as his own practice.
Elliott Hundley’s work is included in significant international public collections including The Broad, Los Angeles, CA; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Turkey; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
