FEAR at James Cohan Gallery

Trenton Doyle Hancock, “Munch”, 2008. Mixed media on paper, 22 1/4 X 22 1/2 inches. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery.

A new body of work by Trenton Doyle Hancock (Season 2) will be on view at James Cohan Gallery New York, November 20 through January 10, 2009.

FEAR, Hancock’s fourth exhibition at the gallery, includes paintings, wall drawings, and a new portfolio of twenty mixed media prints that the artist recently completed at the Rutgers University Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions. The exhibition continues Hancock’s story of an epic battle between the forces of good, as represented by his characters the Mounds and their color-filled world, and evil, as embodied by the skeletal Vegans who live underground in a world of black and white. The centerpiece of the show is a grid-like arrangement of eight five-foot-square canvases installed atop a wall painting that references the underworld battleground between forces. In the title painting, Fear, a Baby, recognizable by its large egg-shaped head, looms above the horizon as the black background is showered in Mound Meat, a pink substance on which Mounds survive and once ingested allows all to experience a life of color. Seven other works in this series illustrate a Baby head amidst the Vegan landscape, lined up as if marching off to battle.

James Cohan Gallery will host a conversation between the artist and Merrily Kerr, a New York-based art historian and writer, on Friday, November 21 at 6:30pm. The talk is organized by The New York Center for Art and Media Studies.