ELLIOTT HUNDLEY

In 2013, Elliott Hundley paused and reflected. The L.A. artist had been working nonstop since well before 2005, when he earned his MFA in painting and drawing from the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2006, Hundley presented a riveting exhibition at the Hammer Museum. That was followed, over the next three years, with three increasingly ambitious exhibitions of increasingly labor-intensive works: at Andre Rosen Gallery in New York, at Galleria Il Capricorno in Venice, Italy, and at Regen Projects in Los Angeles. Over the next two years, Hundley repeated what he had done over the previous three, presenting another trio of exhibitions—each serving up an overwhelming abundance of sensory input—at the same three galleries, along with an even more massive, multilayered, and multivalent exhibition based in Euripides’ blood-drenched tragedy, The Bacchae, at the Wexner Center for the Arts, in Columbus, Ohio, which traveled to the Nasher Sculpture Center, in Dallas Texas.

All four of the immersive, operatic, even hallucinatory exhibitions Hundley presented in 2010 and 2011 were filled with a different combination of quasi-sculptural wallworks and free-standing assemblages, whose individual and collective density and complexity and explosive energy continued to intensify, both mathematically and exponentially. Visitors got delivered—actually,thrust into—a whirlpool of fragmented images, disembodied objects, and suspended gestures, all shot-through with so much spatial ambiguity, emotional turbulence, and moral ambivalence that you could not help but feel you were in a world a-swirl with confusion, its myriadelements splintering and reconfiguring in ways simultaneously fascinating and frightening, exciting and sublime.

Text by David Pagel. Press release courtesy Baik Art.