Stephen Hannock "Recent Paintings: Vistas with Text"
Marlborough (Midtown)
This event has ended.
An exhibition of Stephen Hannock’s recent large-scale paintings, including a room documenting Hannock’s process. Hannock, born in Albany, New York in 1951, lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and New York.
Stephen Hannock began his career as an apprentice to Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) while studying art on exchange at Smith College. Early mentors also included the Massachusetts curators and art historians Elizabeth and Agnes Mongan of the Smith College Museum of Art and the Fogg Art Museum, respectively. After developing a novel technique using unstable phosphorescent acrylic paints in the 1970s to explore illuminative effects, in the early 1980s Hannock moved to Manhattan and fully engaged with the downtown contemporary art scene. Landscape has since been his predominant motif, coupled with an evolving mastery of technique resulting in pictures that appear to glow from within.
Hannock’s first comprehensive exhibition in New York in seven years, Recent Paintings: Vistas with Text features four new paintings of polished mixed media on canvas. All bear his signature, novel technique of working with acrylics, resin, pasted papers and photographs, specialized brushes, and power sanders to produce light effects unrivaled in painting. Hannock’s approach, explicated in the exhibition’s Process Room, involves layering subtly modulated acrylic paint across canvases, repeated polishing with sanders, and veneers of reflective resin burnished to a matte sheen allowing light to penetrate the stratum of the picture and reflect back with exceptional illumination. Pasted materials are fixed in the layers in the tradition of papiers collés, a method employed by Picasso and Braque. The pictures are also covered with handwritten text—comments on locations imaged, giving histories either personal to the artist or relevant to the sites. Hannock works these lines of text, which are not preconceived, into the topography of the image.
[Image: Stephen Hannock "Northern City Renaissance, Mauve Dawn (Mass MoCA #161)" (2012) polished mixed media on canvas 8 x 12 ft.]
Media
Schedule
from April 25, 2012 to June 02, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-05-10 from 17:00 to 20:00
Gallery Night on 57th Street
Artist(s)
Reviews
The Traditional Landscape, Re-imagined: Stephen Hannock at Marlborough Gallery
What is truly extraordinary is that each painting of Hannock’s unfolds like a map of his personal journey through the additions of pasted material and text.
Beyond The Borders of Landscape: An Interview With Stephen Hannock
It was really curious the similarities and thought processes between athletics and making art. Endless practice, rehearsal, over and over and over.