TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK
Born 1974, Oklahoma City, OK
Lives and works in Houston, TX
2000 MFA, Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia
1997 BFA Texas A&M Unviersity, Commerce
Selected honors: Texas Medal of Arts Award for Visual Arts (2019); Greenfield Prize for Visual Art (2013); Joyce Alexander Wein Award, Studio Museum Harlem (2007); Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1998)
Selected museum exhibitions and performances: Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, VA; The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. TX; The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland; and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Selected public collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Studio Museum, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA
For almost two decades, Trenton Doyle Hancock has been constructing fantastical narratives of the battle between good and evil. Hancock pursues his singular vision and distinctive means of storytelling across a variety of media, including painting, collage, sculpture, print and the performing arts. Featured in the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennial, Hancock was one of the youngest artists in history to participate in the museum’s prestigious survey at the time and has garnered acclaim for his exuberant worlds suffused with autobiography and fantasy.
Hancock's complex mythological battles at once recall biblical stories that the artist learned as a child from his family and local church community, comic-strip superhero battles, and medieval morality plays – all conveyed through a visual language that merges disparate influences such as pulp fiction, comic books, abstract painting with references to forebears as varied as Hieronymus Bosch, Max Ernst, and Philip Guston. “For years I was actively searching in art history and contemporary art for things that were reflections of me,” Hancock recalled of his earlier work in conversation with Paula Ferrario for Art in America in 2012. “I could only find my voice as a composite of many different artists…But I could only put the process in motion by setting up a narrative, where I felt more in control.” Hancock transforms traditionally formal decisions—such as use of color, language, and pattern—into opportunities to create new characters, develop sub-plots and convey symbolic meaning. As Hancock stated, “I hope for my painting to be the merging of comic book narrative with the history of abstraction.”
