The Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) will present a mid-career exhibition of work by Elliott Hundley, including an installation rethinking the current display of Greco-Roman antiquities in the Museum’s Ludington Court, 1130 State St. Hundley’s display opens April 20.

The exhibit, titled Proscenium, a broad survey, sees Hundley’s work through the lens of theater, props, sets and backdrops. It brings together 50 artworks from 2000-25, including paintings, collages, assemblages, bronzes, drawings, rarely seen early works, and loans from private collections.

In “By Achilles’ Tomb,” Hundley rethinks and mischievously upends the display of Greco-Roman antiquities in SBMA’s Ludington Court.

Long fascinated by the plays of Euripides (c.480-c.406 BC), especially “Medea” (c.431 BC), “The Bacchae” (c.405 BC), and “Hekabe” (c.424 BC), and ancient Greco-Roman culture and myths, Hundley is an ideal artistic partner to reshape the museum’s most prominent and public space, which opens onto Santa Barbara’s pedestrianized State Street, the museum said.

Hundley has been a nationally and internationally recognized artist since his breakout show in 2006 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. In 2012, a solo exhibit traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohiom and Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas.

In 2019, Hundley was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His works are held by many museums, including the Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles; Colección Jumex, Mexico City; Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

“What began as a straightforward mid-career survey has transformed into an experiment for SBMA and a consequential expansion of Hundley’s practice into the reinstallation of a museum collection,” SBMA said.

During an early visit to the SBMA, Hundley walked through Ludington Court with its ancient art and asked James Glisson, SBMA chief curator and curator of contemporary art, about putting his art in that space.

“Since then, Proscenium has developed into a hybrid, genre-busting project: part mid-career survey, part startling juxtaposition of Hundley’s sculptures with ancient marbles, part collaboration with museum art installers to shake up the display,” SBMA said.

“All of this is with the goal of revealing that despite its apparent playfulness Hundley’s art dwells on profound issues — mortality, violence, the ephemerality of beauty, and the inescapability of fate — and returns painting and sculpture to something closer to ritual or ceremony in which lines between art and life, fiction and fact are blurred,” the museum said.

Hundley’s art imagines a world where the pagan gods acted like humans, and human heroes, such as those in the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” could attain something like the status of Greek gods, the museum said.