Regen Projects to open Echo, a survey of works by Elliott Hundley that showcase the breadth and depth of the artist’s practice over the last 20 years. Inspired by the activity and environment of Hundley’s Chinatown studio, the densely organized structure of the show creates a total installation that collapses the boundaries between the artwork and its process of becoming. This is the artist’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery.
Hundley’s liberal embrace of media and materials is on full display in Echo, which presents a concentrated, at times overlapping array of works including large-scale collages, freestanding and hanging sculptures, assemblages, paintings, photographs, ceramics, and works on paper. Into this dense field of symbols, icons, and forms, Hundley inserts items of personal significance he has collected over the years. Taken together, the overwhelming accumulation of objects and artworks teems with all manner of cultural debris, acting like thought clouds that give shape to the feverish affinities, attachments, and excesses of contemporary experience.
The exhibition is structured around a series of foam-covered walls that delineate the space and act as supports for hanging works. The foam serves, too, as fertile ground for intricate groupings of free-form collages which burst forth between and around the adjacent compositions. These interstitial arrangements encroach on the autonomous art object, subsuming it into the logic of the whole. In muddying the boundaries between studio and gallery, Hundley recasts the exhibition—and his practice—as an immense, life-size collage that is in a perpetual state of becoming.
A highlight of the critically acclaimed 2021 Prospect.5 biennial in New Orleans, Hundley’s Balcony will also make its Los Angeles debut. Titled after Jean Genet’s 1956 satire, the work reenacts a moment from the play in which the division of fantasy and reality collapses and social codes are suspended. In Hundley’s Balcony, thousands of sundry images, both found and created, make their way across the panoramic expanse of canvas, pooling together into a porous landscape of signifiers that flicker between intimate self-portrait and collective unconscious. Like the balcony of Genet’s play, Hundley’s work is a compound space, at once real and surreal, microcosm and macrocosm, where queer and common, privileged and poor, bump up against and inhabit one another.
Elliott Hundley, Echo, !4th January – 19th February 2023, Regen Projects
An opening reception for the artist will be held on Saturday, January 14th, from 6:00 – 8:00 pm.
About the artist
Elliott Hundley (b. 1975, Greensboro, NC) received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2005. He lives and works in Los Angeles. Hundley has been featured in numerous museum exhibitions in the US and abroad. Earlier this year, his work was presented in the 5th Prospect New Orleans triennial, Yesterday we said tomorrow (2021–2022). He has been the subject of solo exhibitions including The Bacchae, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2011), which traveled to Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2012) and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2006). Group exhibitions include Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2021); The Broad, Los Angeles (2018–2019); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017–2018; 2016); 7th Moscow International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2017–2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2015–2016; 2013; 2010; 2009–2010; 2007); Istanbul Museum of Modern Art (2015–2016); MOCA Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles (2011); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010–2011; 2007); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010; 2007); among others.
Curatorial projects by the artist include Open House, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019) and Make-Shift- Future, Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2021). He received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. Work by the artist is held in prominent museum collections including Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive; The Broad, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Istanbul Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others.
