Trenton Doyle Hancock "New Works"
James Cohan Gallery
This event has ended.
Texas-based artist Trenton Doyle Hancock returns to New York for his fifth solo exhibition at James Cohan Gallery. The artist is well known for creating densely layered mixed-media installations that merge words and images in painting, collage, sculpture, print, and the performing arts.
For this exhibition, Hancock departs from the ongoing epic narrative that has guided his work for the past decade. Here, he creates a body of new paintings that reveal the creator of the myth and demystify the author. …And Then It All Came Back To Me expands on metaphysical interpretations of the artist’s dreams, the invented symbolic language that has long been a hallmark of the work, and most notably on the idea of self-portraiture as exploration of the artist-as-archetype.
In this new body of work, which Hancock refers to as “radical autobiography,” the action takes place at the front of the picture plane, with complex terrain behind. An intense spotlight shines on the protagonist—Hancock himself—that forces us to contemplate whether this character is hero or failure. “How absurd is it to be an artist?” Hancock asks.
Word-plays, palindromes, maxims and proverbs provide a springboard for the visual imagery and set the mood of the paintings. These witty and often self-deprecating poetic musings of the artist’s invention are cut out or collaged onto the canvas, creating texture and tone. Hancock works to marry the image to the text, which in turn informs the work’s titles.
Viewers will find a rich trove of references in these emotionally charged paintings, with motifs from the artist’s personal lexicon of recurrent images including bones, cats, cages, feet, bloodshot eyes, black and white striped fur, and pink flesh. Additionally, Hancock gathers inspiration from many outside sources: the late work of Philip Guston, which also used the artist’s studio as subject; Mathias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, in which, Hancock says, “you can see the torture of the world in Christ’s gnarled foot”; B-grade horror films that inspire Hancock to become a “serial killer for the eye”; and the reevaluation of the artist’s devout Christian upbringing, with its stirring tales of martyrdom and re-birth.
Hancock lives and works in Houston, Texas.
Media
Schedule
from November 08, 2012 to December 22, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-11-08 from 18:00 to 20:00