Trenton Doyle Hancock “Something American”

James Cohan Gallery

This event has ended.

Something American, an exhibition of new work by Trenton Doyle Hancock, is now open at 48 Walker Street and 291 Grand Street. The exhibition spans both of the gallery’s locations, with new paintings in Tribeca and a presentation of the second chapter of Hancock’s ongoing graphic novel in the Lower East Side.

Over a career spanning nearly twenty-five years, Trenton Doyle Hancock has created a singular body of visual art that exuberantly subverts and synthesizes his omnivorous influences to invent a world entirely his own. This exhibition features new paintings that demonstrate the breadth and dexterity of Hancock’s practice: explorations of never before seen corners of the Moundverse and densely layered and collaged reexaminations of Hancock’s extraordinary iconography. These works contend with American identity and cultural expression, while confronting the ever-evolving, attendant structures of white supremacy. Hancock brings these forces into his fantastical universe in order to grapple with them—this metaphorical space, while it invites parallels to our own, is entirely under the artist’s control. In this exhibition, the artist takes us on a deeply personal journey through the multivalent facets of the self. His superhero embodiment Torpedo Boy, an American football gladiator, and the artist’s self portraits all echo the contours of his mind, rendering visible a rich interiority. Hancock’s artmaking becomes a strategy of radical autobiography and a way of seeing, of looking closely both at the world outside and deep within oneself.

Central to the exhibition are several paintings depicting an imagined meeting between the artist’s alter ego Torpedo Boy, a black superhero, and the buffoonish Klansmen that populated Philip Guston’s paintings. Hancock prizes the ambiguity and the mutability of this moment, and has returned to it again and again. As he notes: “The more you dissect the image, the more it becomes fraught with historic tension and with my own history as a painter. It keeps feeding itself as an image. The item that is exchanged between them changes the narrative each time.”