Visiting Artist Elliott Hundley in His Kaleidoscopic Los Angeles Loft

Beyond the two dedicated exhibition spaces, the entire building is a kind of Kunstkammer writ large, where the crosscurrents of Hundley’s practice—montage and assemblage, polyphony and cacophony—animate the rooms and everything in them. “I don’t think about the way things look together at all. I think about the beauty of the individual pieces, and then I just play with them,” Hundley says of his deftly imbricated, uber-eclectic decor. “I love repurposing old things, giving them new life and meaning. I don’t mind broken or chipped antiques. It isn’t about pedigree and perfection, but there is a certain kind of connoisseurship at work.”

Joshua Hagler’s painting of Michael Jackson, My God, commands the bedroom. Artworks, from left, include Hundley’s foam sculpture Block, his bronze sculpture Lyre, a table lamp by Farrell Hundley, and a Chris Miller ceramic sculpture.

Art: Chris Miller. Æmen Ededéen. Farrell Hundley/Friedman Benda.

Echo the parrot perched before Hundley’s Her House Smouldering.

Art: Elliott Hundley/Regen Projects and Kasmin Gallery.

Hundley’s democratic tastes and aesthetics of muchness come to life in decorative vignettes that would feel hopelessly forced and jarring in lesser hands. Midcentury biomorphic sofas and chairs mingle amicably with gilded fauteuils and Victoriana. Windsor chairs cozy up to antique Chinese tables. In the small garden at the rear of the building, the artist paired a giant commercial bird sculpture with a burnt Organic Baroque Chair by Tony Duquette for Baker Furniture, salvaged from the fire that destroyed the legendary design wizard’s Malibu ranch, Sortilegium, in 1993. The through line for these madcap compositions is art—lots and lots of art, including a generous sampling of Hundley’s own paintings and sculptures mixed with pieces by his artist friends. “I’m constantly rearranging everything. I treat the whole space like a collage,” he maintains.

The gallery displays Hundley’s sculpture Semele’s Collapse (foreground) and his collage The Plague (rear wall). The sculpture at left is by Charles Long. The painting at right and sculpture on palette are by Nicolas Shake.

Art: Elliott Hundley/Regen Projects and Kasmin Gallery. Charles Long. Nicolas Shake/Dylan Brant Fine Art and Galerie Timonier.

The many faces of Hundley’s career are currently on glorious display in a two-pronged exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The first, “Proscenium,” a mid-career survey on view through August 31, brings together more than 50 artworks created between 2000 and 2025. (The title of the survey nods to Hundley’s engagement with theater as an essential inspiration for his practice.) For the second part of the show, the artist has reinstalled pieces from the museum’s collection of Greco-Roman antiquities in a genre-bending presentation that celebrates Hundley’s long-standing fascination with classical mythology. “By Achilles’ Tomb,” his fantasia on Greco-Roman themes and iconography, remains on view in SBMA’s Ludington Court through February 22, 2026.