AROUND THE GALLERIES

Elliott Hundley’s fantastic exhibition takes visitors on head-spinning trips that go every which way. Stopping off in such unlikely places as Dumpsters, thrift stores and ancient Greek stages, the young artist’s paintings, sculptures, collages, photographs and odd combinations of all these media transform forlorn leftovers into stunning tableaux. A blood-drenched tragedy from 2,000 years ago is brought up to the minute, its heartless vengeance and searing anguish making a month of the nightly news look like a walk in the park.

Titled “Hekabe,” after a wildly violent tragedy by Euripides, Hundley’s solo show at Regen Projects II -- his second in Los Angeles -- plays so fast, loose and deftly with recent art history that it conjures the formidable spirits of Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly without getting lost in their shadows. The gritty dreaminess of their richly inventive mixes of everyday stuff and soul-expanding fantasy are made even more focused, loaded and potent by Hundley’s art without losing any of their scope or generosity.

Hundley’s installation makes a virtue of the phrase “begged, borrowed and stolen.” The recycled objects and dramas in his work raise pointed questions about the relationship between the individual and the growing mass of humanity that seems to be filling the globe to bursting.

In the entryway, Hundley has hung seven midsize light boxes that illuminate photographs of his friends pretending to be characters in “Hekabe.” There is “Josh as Agamemnon,” “Teddy as Polydoros” and “Ivan and Daniel as the Sons of Polymester.”

Their costumes are improvised. Some would fit into high-end fashion shoots. Others look as if they were made for a school play. The settings are even more casually adapted: simply the chaos of Hundley’s jampacked studio, where he stores his secondhand stuff.

The lighting is charged -- campy, melodramatic, effective. The characters’ expressions are unforgettable, suffused with so much pathos, doubt and honesty that the trappings of playacting fall away to expose the reality of emotions.

And that’s just the prelude. In the main gallery, Hundley has installed three wall reliefs, three big sculptures, two huge landscape paintings and a backlighted photograph.

From a distance, the reliefs appear to be gestural abstractions, dramatically composed whorls of color, texture and form. From up close you see that Hundley’s pieces are made up of thousands of tiny elements, each stuck with a pin as if part of a misbegotten butterfly collection.

Individual sequins get the same treatment as beads, bangles and all sorts of mini-ornaments. The same goes for snapshot-size pictures of Hundley’s friends, sometimes dressed as characters, sometimes nude and always meticulously cut from the photo so that no backgrounds are visible.

Images of chairs, wheels, trees, lamps and umbrellas make for a mix of things that sustain endless interpretations. Individual letters, clipped from magazines in the manner of old-fashioned ransom notes, spell out lines from “Hekabe” as well as the instructions for Method actor training exercises.

Hundley’s 3-D pieces allow him to strut his stuff with greater muscularity. Amid dense layers of dangling, earring-like ornaments, he has crafted idiosyncratic networks of drinking straws fastened together with pins and spray-painted gold. In another piece blusters a windstorm of tiny gold leaves, recycled from piles of costume jewelry.

An actual scythe anchors “Polyxena’s Sacrifice,” alongside a few interlocked sets of deer antlers, a weighty ceramic vase and a shelf carved from a tree trunk. The facade of Hundley’s mongrel mobile resembles several paper kites that have crash-landed.

The show is a hallucinatory treasure hunt. Filled with sorrow and redemption, fragility and strength, anonymity and intimacy, it’s among the best of recent memory.

--

Regen Projects II, 9016 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through April 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.regenprojects.com

--

Bold works in the fabric of L.A.

As a piece of historical scholarship, “Gallery 32 and Its Circle” is first-rate: an informative time capsule that gathers about 50 works by 20 artists who visited or exhibited at the gallery Suzanne Jackson ran out of her modest apartment in the Granada Building near MacArthur Park from March 15, 1969, to Aug. 30, 1970.

As an art exhibition, it’s even better. An impressive number of the works installed at Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery by director Carolyn Peter and guest curator Damon Willick have not faded with age but are as bold and evocative as they were 40 years ago, when many were first exhibited at the upstart gallery.

Standouts include three haunting body prints by David Hammons, five enchanting pieces by Betye Saar, a solid figurative assemblage by John Outterbridge, a melancholic drawing by Charles White and four crisp prints by Emory Douglas, who was the minister of culture for the Black Panther Party.

Works by less renowned artists are just as compelling. These include Timothy Washington’s larger-than-life sculptures, Joe Van Ramp’s intense little collage, John Stinson’s exquisitely dense abstractions and Senga Nengudi’s vinyl sculpture filled with brightly dyed water.

The short-lived gallery gave many African American artists their start. It also provided a forum for discussions about art, life and politics. Jackson ran it while taking drawing classes from White at the nearby Otis Art Institute and making her own works, three of which are displayed. To pay the rent, she danced at a nightclub.

Compared with contemporary venues in the art business, “Gallery 32” may not sound like much. But its effect cannot be measured by sales or headlines. Instead, it is part of the social fabric of Los Angeles, an essential ingredient to the rich mix of city life, past and present.

--

Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, 1 LMU Drive, Westchester, (310) 338-2880, through March 22. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. cfa .lmu.edu/laband

--

The shapes of powerlessness

To look at Dimitri Kozyrev’s five new paintings at the Mark Moore Gallery is to feel as if you’re sifting through the rubble of some cataclysm. It’s impossible to know if you’re looking at the blasted aftermath of a terrorist attack or simply staring at the screen of your laptop as its digital info convulses and freezes before crashing completely.

This whiplash shift from public tragedies to personal frustrations is Kozyrev’s specialty. His large-format canvases deliver it with aplomb by confusing the boundaries between feelings and facts. They also make paranoia appear to be a pretty sensible response to the newly global world, in which the horror of powerlessness takes ever-changing shape.

Each of Kozyrev’s predominantly abstract paintings splinters the picture-plane. Compositional unity is fractured into jagged fragments that provide faceted, often conflicting perspectives of a world without center.

Sometimes it seems as if you’re looking into a landscape dotted with barren trees. At others, your view seems to be interrupted by glitches in the transmission. In all of Kozyrev’s conflicted works, solid structures drift into focus only to disintegrate, leaving your desire to stand on terra firma maddeningly unsatisfied.

Each part of each painting is handled differently. Sometimes, the delicacy and detail of super-realistic watercolors predominate. At others, the rough-and-ready messiness of mortar-slathered bricks takes over. Everywhere, the jostling planes of Cubism meet the giddy instantaneousness of the Digital Age.

Kozyrev, currently based in Arizona, was born in 1967 in what used to be the Soviet Union and is now St. Petersburg, Russia. The sense of one system breaking down and another replacing it takes chilling shape in his vertiginous images of profound instability.

--

Mark Moore Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through March 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.markmooregallery.com

--

There’s lyricism in this dark art

The six paintings and four prints in veteran New York artist Joan Snyder’s L.A. solo debut are vintage Snyder: chewy clots of mismatched materials wrestled into abstract images that are lyrical without being lightweight, visceral without being heavy-handed.

At the Solway-Jones Gallery, the fleshy physicality and broken-bones impact begins with the stuff Snyder uses. Into her gooey mixes of dripping acrylics and runny oils she sprinkles seeds, herbs, twigs, glitter and nails. She contains these stews with nest-like enclosures sculpted from papier-mache and torn strips of fabric. When they dry, they have the presence of wounded flesh, freshly scabbed over yet too sensitive to touch. Think of these parts of her paintings as scars in the making.

The soaring lyricism in Snyder’s otherwise dark art comes through via her capacity to make paint sing. She slaps gestures together with the best of them without wasting a move or missing a beat.

There’s a no-nonsense frugality to her funky art, which is nothing if not serious. There’s also great pleasure, which comes with the wisdom of knowing what you can do and then doing more than that for reasons you can’t quite explain.

It’s odd for an artist of Snyder’s stature to be having her first solo show in L.A. It’s doubly so because her go-it-alone, category-be-damned, DIY-style rhymes so well with so much of the best painting made in L.A.

--

Solway-Jones Gallery, 990 N. Hill St., No. 180, L.A., (323) 223-0224, through April 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .solwayjonesgallery.com

--

calendar@latimes.com