Forthcoming
Solo Exhibitions: -
The Agency, London. 4 September - 4 October 2008
Group Exhibitions: -
'The Past is History' (Curated by Rumley & Ellis) Changing Role Gallery, Rome & Naples, Italy.
26 May - 12 September 2008
'The Future is Now' (Curated by Rumley & Ellis) Old Truman's Brewery, London. October 2008
'Kapelmeister Pulls a Dozy' (Curated by Richard Meaghan) Seven Seven Contemporary, September 2008
Press: -
David is featured in the latest issues of the following magazines: -
Wound No. 3 The Pity Issue - 'David Hancock & Kate Davies - Don't Bleed for Me' by Melanie Moreau
Amelia's Magazine Issue 9 - David Hancock by Amy Knight
'Young Ones Fall to the Rocks Below'
Acrylic on Canvas, 137 x 244 cm, 2006
David Hancock work concentrates on the notion of a 'Generation X'. He attempts to make palpable in his work the psychological gap between the world that we physically experience and the psychological states through which it is apprehended.
Hancock achieves this by choosing a semi-photorealist technique, yet he attempts to show a form of escapism, whether through youth subcultures or by directly referencing historical utopian visions. His paintings are drawn from a narrative base, which is supplied through a network of acquaintances and based upon real experiences. His technical virtuosity is captured on canvas with posed portraits of youngsters doing their thing in their own particular way. Through Hancock's paintings, anonymous kids become literary heroes and historical figures, transcendent through the large scale of the works.
His work is rooted in the tradition of Romanticism or the Victorian utopian visions of Ruskin, Morris and Pre-Raphaelitism. The signifiers are taken from historical works of art, sources and themes. These are suggested through the appropriation of composition, gestures or objects. In the use of paint, combined with a traditional method of realisation, as well as the choice for a large scale, these works claim a historical significance, elevating the status of the paintings, and subsequently transporting these works to an era when myth, symbolism and truth to nature were prevalent in art.
He chooses to create, however, a series of Urban Myths or contemporary moral tales. The photogenic aspect of his technique allows him to play with the viewer's notions of reality, drawing them into certain details embellished from the narrative. The result is a two-dimensional environment, which is created by tiny iridescent brushstrokes. This handmade, yet effectively computer-like effect allows the viewer to literally step inside the painting, or the matrix.
His work made around photographic images of youths provides a different window onto the world of growing up in the glare of our obsessive photographic reality. David Hancock documents a generation who wishes to believe in Utopia, but suffers from the knowledge of its decline. His work portrays a society that is unrealistic or unable to realize itself, through actual communities founded in attempts to create an ideal society. With his contemporary language he offers to his models to leave a statement and exist for eternity, in opposition to the Warholian affirmation of 15 min of fame.
Whilst Hancock's Generation X is still well and truly alive and eternalised in his work, his technique and ultimate aim is anything but nihilistic. On the contrary it reminds of the maligned and re-discovered works of Alma Tadema, which managed to hit a nerve despite being controversial at times.
Photo-realism is an agenda that is under discussion with a number of contemporary painters and, yet, is viewed from a critical distance, as if it was a blip of the Seventies. Ironically it was in the Seventies that Alma-Tadema's work was re-discovered as significant. Hancock's work is concerned with opening up the possibilities that exist at the juncture between painting and photography: using both mediums as part of a broader conceptual examination of the resonance between the cult of the individual and anonymity in todays media saturated world.
text by Melanie Moreau
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