Elliott Hundley, 1975

Elliott Hundley was born in Greensboro, North Carolina. In his works he uses found objects such as magazine clippings, bamboo, string, paper, photographs, plastic, and foam. These everyday consumer materials used by modern urbanites come together in the artist’s works in an irregular fashion, thus making reference to life’s chaotic structure. The subjects of Hundley’s works involve the loss of the ideal of “modern” life, especially in Western society, the dead-ends of despair, the limitlessness of consumption and the wealth of garbage. In his collages, the artist renders visible the impossibility of imagined perfection. The materials he uses in combination have their own memories, and with the personal meanings Hundley adds to them, entirely new narratives emerge in his works. The interrelations of the diverse references within the whole transform his paintings into a field of exploration. In Hundley’s works, history, mythology and views of vast and fantastic landscapes turn into an aggregate of fairytale-like images. Constituting the artist’s personal mythology, this sentimental and nostalgic aggregate is akin to a condensed dreamscape.

In Hundley’s work “Part”, featured in Istanbul Modern’s collection, the architecture of intertwining spiral forms takes the viewer on a profound journey through a monumental and surreal space. The performative expression in Hundley’s working process, the layers formed by interwoven images, the small figure hidden among these layers and details of different places are like the equivalent of narrative on the abstract plane.