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Overwinter (work of art)

Artwork Info

Created
2016
Artist
Elliott Hundley (American, born 1975)
Dimensions
58 1/2 × 50 3/8 × 7 inches (148.6 × 128 × 17.8 centimeters)

Credit

Purchased with funds from the William R. Roberson Jr. and Frances M. Roberson Endowed Fund for North Carolina Art

Object Number
2023.12.1
Culture
American North Carolina
Classification
Mixed Media
Department
Modern

Key Ideas

  • This mixed media work combines elements of painting and collage. Collages can include a variety of materials, such as paper, photos, fabric, paint, and found objects. 
  • Elliott Hundley is an American artist who is originally from North Carolina.
  • Hundley is known for creating mixed media paintings, collages, and sculptures. His work is often made up of both original and found materials. 
  • This work was inspired by a play that was written in the 1930s. The story took place in the future, in the year 2000.
  • The tiny human figures featured in this work are the artist’s friends and family. He had them pose for the photographs he used in his artwork.

Learn More

Overwinter depicts a sci-fi landscape filled with mysterious objects. These include floating eyeballs and planets, glass cups, plastic bananas, car keys, and stick shelters. It is a dreamscape filled with cutouts of tiny human figures. These are staged photographs of the artist’s friends and family. The setting is a world in which the sky and earth seem upside down. The surface is covered with hundreds of straight pins, each with a dab of paint on the head of the pin.

Fortunately, the form itself is very flexible, so I can put anything on and take anything off during the process.

Elliott Hundley

Elliott Hundley is a contemporary American abstract painter and installation artist. He describes his mixed media artworks as both collages and paintings. Hundley’s multimedia artworks mix abstract and representational elements, inviting the viewer to create their own stories and meanings. Abstract art does not attempt to represent anything from reality. Representational art depicts something from reality.

Collage has been one of the most relevant forms of art making. It’s resonant because it is made of the stuff that we see every day. It’s familiar. It reflects our reality.

Elliott Hundley

Hundley’s works are often inspired by his interest in theater, books, and movies. Overwinter is loosely based on Antonin Artaud’s play, There Is No More Firmament. The play was written in the 1930s and set in the imagined year 2000. It is about society’s frantic response to a cataclysmic event that is getting ready to happen.

I’m not inspired by controlling things. I’m inspired by our ability to make sense of what is not within our control or our understanding.

Elliott Hundley

Hundley was born in 1975 in Greensboro, North Carolina. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Additional Resources

Resources for Teachers

 

Resources for Students

  • Watch a video of Hundley describing his creative process and what inspires him.
  • Visit a web page to read the artist’s biography and see more examples of his work.
  • View images of Hundley’s large-scale art installations.

Images

  • A layered mixed media work resembling a science fiction landscape

    Overwinter

    A densely layered mixed media work resembling a science fiction landscape. It features three-dimensional objects including foam eyeballs and planets, glass cups, plastic bananas, car keys, tiny cutouts of human figures, and hundreds of paint-tipped straight pins.