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James Cohan is pleased to present a solo booth of new work by Trenton Doyle Hancock.
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In this suite of mixed media canvases, Hancock imagines a meeting between his alter-ego Torpedoboy, a Black superhero, and one of the buffoonish Klansmen who populated Philip Guston’s paintings.
“Recently, in my comics and paintings, I’ve used the Klansman to represent America’s contract with White Supremacy, especially how that contract is negotiated with Black Americans. I’ve paired the volatile klansman symbol with my own Black superhero, Torpedoboy, in order to highlight the “exchange” or dialogue that Black Americans are forced into daily.”
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Central to the series is Step and Screw: West End Scrap (Four Foot Furry Face Off), 2021, in which the bespectacled artist and his superhero doppelganger Torpedoboy come face-to-face. This meeting between creator and creation is interrupted by the disembodied, hooded head of a Klansman floating between them. The giant pencil the artist holds creates a powerful sense of ambiguity. Is this floating head an unfinished artistic endeavor or the physical embodiment of a looming white supremacy? Dense faux fur is collaged onto the surface of the painting. The introduction of this tactile element gives a perverse sense of creature-hood to the painting itself.
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With this Exchange series, Hancock extracts and enlarges a chronological progression of graphic images onto ink and paper collaged on canvas. The black and white palette strips the formal and narrative elements in this body of work down to their studs to create paintings of illustrative intensity. The artist prizes the ambiguity and the mutability of this meeting, and has returned to it again and again.
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“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.”
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In Step and Screw: West End Scrap #3, 2021, Torpedo Boy peers through a crack in the door at a lurking Klansman. This moment is laced with dread, suggesting that the Klansman, and the racism he embodies, is still outside the door, and in fact has been there all along.
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TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK, STEP AND SCREW: WEST END SCRAP #7, 2021Click Image for Details
Hancock transforms traditionally formal decisions—such as his use of color, language, and pattern—into opportunities to create new characters, develop sub-plots and convey symbolic meaning. Text both drives the narrative and acts as a central visual component. This incisive use of language as tool is evident in Step and Screw: West End Scrap #7, 2020, in which a stuttering Klansman asks Hancock’s superhero, “K-K-Kan I help you?”
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“Guston often spoke of ghosts in the studio, voices of predecessors requiring exorcism. At some point, you have to stop the chase and confront those voices.”
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Police characters recently appeared in the second chapter of Hancock’s ongoing graphic novel, Trenton Doyle Hancock Presents The Moundverse. As the artist notes, “it’s been a lot of fun to turn them into ineffectual buffoons. In the story, you have some kind of power over them, and you can act on it.” The conflict between Hancock’s protagonist Torpedoboy and these supporting characters becomes a vehicle for examining the extremism and idealism that often seem inherent to American identity and cultural expression, while looking closely at the ever-evolving, attendant structures of white supremacy. Art becomes a strategy of seeing—of looking at the world and laying bare its honest, ugly corners—while also finding beauty and humor.
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NEW EDITION
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To coincide with his solo presentation at Frieze New York, Hancock has created a new suite of four prints entitled Exchanging Variables, published by Flatbed Press in Austin, Texas. Hancock often revisits significant narrative vignettes and characters from his ongoing Moundverse saga—each subsequent iteration allowing for formal experimentation and the development of new layers of meaning and symbolism.
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In this quartet of aquatints, Hancock’s erstwhile superhero doppelganger Torpedoboy faces off with Guston’s hooded Klansman, the artist himself, a police patrolman, and a Pinocchio-nosed Christ. The inverted monochromatic palette, with figures delineated in greyscale and symbols in white, allows the artist to focus the viewer’s attention on the changing variables that punctuate the moment of meeting he calls “the Exchange.”
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CHECKLIST
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TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK, Step and Screw: West End Scrap (Four Foot Furry Face Off), 2021
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TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK, Step and Screw: West End Scrap #1, 2020
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TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK, Step and Screw: West End Scrap #2, 2020
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TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK, Step and Screw: West End Scrap #3, 2021
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TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK, Step and Screw: West End Scrap #4, 2020
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TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK, Step and Screw: West End Scrap #5, 2021
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TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK, Step and Screw: West End Scrap #6, 2020
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TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK, Step and Screw: West End Scrap #7, 2021
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LEARN MORE
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
For almost two decades, Trenton Doyle Hancock (b. 1974, Oklahoma City, OK) has been constructing his own fantastical narrative that continues to develop and inform his prolific artistic output. Part fictional, part autobiographical, Hancock’s work pulls from his own personal experience, art historical canon, comics and superheroes, pulp fiction, and myriad pop culture references, resulting in a complex amalgamation of characters and plots possessing universal concepts of light and dark, good and evil, and all the grey in between.
Frieze New York at the Shed
Current viewing_room
