TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK,Coloration Coronation, Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 90 x 132 in.
Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York
The Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin is pleased to welcome artist Trenton Doyle Hancock as the Spring 2018 Visiting Chair in Fine and Performing Arts at The University of Texas at Austin's Department of Art and Art History. The residency is supported by an endowment for the College of Fine Arts Distinguished Visiting Chair. Hancock will be given dedicated time and space for creating new work at UT Austin. During that time, he will also engage with UT Austin students through two public lectures, studio visits and seminars.
Raised in Paris, TX and based out of Houston, Hancock has received national and international attention for his hybridization of comic book narratives and abstraction within a wide range of media from prints, drawing and mixed media to installation and performance. Most recently, Hancock’s work was exhibited in a solo exhibition, Mind of the Mound, organized by Art League Houston for the 2017 Texas Artist of the Year Exhibition and exhibited at the former Rice University Art Gallery. Hancock’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennials.
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. Hancock’s works are suffused with personal mythology presented at an operatic scale, often reinterpreting Biblical stories that the artist learned as a child from his family and local church community. His exuberant and subversive narratives employ a variety of cultural tropes, ranging in tone from comic-strip superhero battles to medieval morality plays and influenced in style by Hieronymus Bosch, Max Ernst, Henry Darger, Philip Guston and R. Crumb. Text embedded within the paintings and drawings both drives the narrative and acts as a central visual component. The resulting sprawling installations spill onto beyond the canvas edges and onto gallery walls.
His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; The Contemporary (formerly The Jones Center for Contemporary Art), Austin; The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Institute for Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa; The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
The residency will take place from February 22- March 9, and March 19- April 6, 2018, with lectures on Thursday, February 22, 2018 at 4pm and on Wednesday, March 28, 2018 at 4pm in the ART building auditorium 1.102.