Elliot Hundley: Echo

Regen Projects is pleased to present 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 2021–2022 Prospect.5 triennial 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.