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"Stepping into Elliott Hundley's Los Angeles studio is a lot like standing before one of his monumental wall-hung assemblages\u2014you're not quite sure where to look first. Both are laden with a kaleidoscopic mix of seductive images and mysterious items, and both reward closer inspection.\n\nPinterestFacebook\n\nA native of North Carolina, the artist began attracting savvy collectors\u2014among them Eli Broad and Peter Brant\u2014shortly after receiving his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2005. A solo show of his work at the Hammer Museum a year later introduced viewers to his enigmatic combinations of painting, sculpture, collage, and photography in a densely imbricated installation. That display also revealed many of his signature themes, including antiquity, theater, and other subjects that have captivated Hundley since his five-year sojourn in Rome before graduate school.\n\n\"The shock of seeing so many historic epochs collapsed in a single building or street was astonishing,\" he says of his experience abroad. \"I was making gestural abstract paintings at the time, but the energy of Rome really spurred my interest in narrative art.\"\n\nPinterestFacebook\n\nStorytelling is essential to his practice, as evidenced by his celebrated series \"The Bacchae,\" a rapturous fugue on Euripides' tale of ecstasy and violence. After building sets for his imaginary production of the play and photographing friends and family as the characters, Hundley incorporated the images into hallucinatory tableaux he refers to as \"billboards,\" which are also embellished with thousands of found objects, magazine clippings, sequins, flowers, text passages, and magnifying glasses\u2014all obsessively layered and secured with glue and an army of straight pins that extends the picture plane outward into three dimensions. The series debuted at New York's Andrea Rosen Gallery and L.A.'s Regen Projects before traveling to museums.\n\nHundley promises that his next show, at Andrea Rosen later this spring, will reveal the behind-the-scenes action of his pretend production. \"It's as if the curtain came down on The Bacchae and now you're backstage,\" he explains of the new work, which\u2014as usual for him\u2014will span multiple media. The play, it seems, is still the thing.\n\nPinterestFacebook"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/artist-elliott-hundley-los-angeles-the-bacchae>