Marc Hundley

Canada is pleased to present The Vanity of Human Greatness, Marc Hundley’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. It’s really two shows in one: the main gallery features the grander points of Hundley’s views on the hubris of human life, while the smaller project room finds the artist in a more reflective mood. The works in the larger room employ found imagery and text, rendered in shiny metallic colors. Hundley recreates a Roy Lichtenstein cigarette painting, an ad for the novel Strangers on a Train, and a huge image of a statue of Achilles holding a sword seemingly preparing to smite the word nature. The pieces reach the scale and ratios of billboards, six by twelve feet in one case, dwarfing the viewer with the type of confidence usually reserved for selling products. The walls have been painted a dusty gray, implying that we are outside in a scruffy urban space. Hundley has chosen softer source material as well, such as an image lifted from the classic children’s book, The Story of Ferdinand, the tale of a pacifist bull who refuses to fight and is happiest enjoying flowers in a pasture and eventually in the hair of voyeuristic ladies in a Madrid bullring.

In the project room Hundley has created an intimate domestic space for his show-within-a-show. He has titled this low-key meta-show The Greatest Thing, taken from the Led Zeppelin song Friends. Despite the heaviness of the music, the song declares that trading a smile with another person is the greatest thing one can do. The works are smaller in scale and have a more soulful approach towards his subject: people. The stridently declarative nature of the public square is gone, and we find Hundley remembering specific relationships, moments, or individuals. These works offer more of the artist's hand, in contrast with the hard edge, nearly commercial approach of his larger works. The personal nature of these painted pieces gain power through the pairing of imagery with an address or a date, often corresponding to an important event in his life.

Hundley isn’t a newshound, social media junkie, or polemicist. He maintains a bemused fondness for the myopic culture that he is both a part of and slightly distanced from. Never one to scold, he gently pokes fun at the folly of human vanity and we, in turn, enjoy the artist basking in the tiny glow of human overconfidence. The awfulness of the public square we currently endure is certainly part of his life, but he takes the long view. Surely things, he seems to suggest, are better now than they were in, say, the Dark Ages—a time full of dangerous superstition and constant violence. We are getting better, maybe just a bit; but when you are down or low it’s ok to retreat to your room and play a record.

Marc Hundley (b. 1971, Toronto, Canada) is represented by Canada, New York and The Modern Institute, Glasgow. His work has been exhibited at The Jewish Museum, New York; Serpentine Galleries, London; White Columns, New York; Printed Matter, Inc., New York; Ratio 3, San Francisco; The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Canada, New York; Team Gallery, New York; Herald St, London; and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, among others. His work is held in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and has been reviewed in Artforum, Frieze, New York Magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Architectural Digest, and Vogue. Marc Hundley: The Voyage Out, co-published with The Modern Institute in Fall 2023, marks a three-decade inventory of Hundley’s eclectic artistic output, from furniture, clothes and gifts to painting, text-based works and more.