Stephen Hannock
Moving Water, Fleeting Light
Marlborough Fine Art, London
5 February – 1 March 2014
MARLBOROUGH FINE ART
6 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BY
www.marlboroughfineart.com
Moving Water, Fleeting Light
Marlborough Fine Art, London
5 February – 1 March 2014
Marlborough Fine Art presents an exhibition of Stephen Hannock’s recent paintings. Stephen Hannock, born in Albany, New York, in 1951, lives and works in Williamstown and North Adams, Massachusetts.
Stephen Hannock began his career as an apprentice to Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) while studying art on exchange at Smith College. Early mentors also included the Massachusetts curators and art historians Elizabeth and Agnes Mongan of the Smith College Museum of Art and the Fogg Art Museum, respectively. After developing a novel technique using unstable phosphorescent acrylic paints in the 1970s to explore illuminative effects, in the early 1980s Stephen Hannock moved to Manhattan and fully engaged with the downtown contemporary art scene. He returned to Massachusetts in 2003. Landscape has since been his predominant motif, coupled with an evolving mastery of technique resulting in pictures that appear to glow from within.
Stephen Hannock’s first exhibition in London features thirteen new paintings. A number of these, including a winged and glowing view above Newcastle in northeast England that explores the region’s rich history titled Northern City Renaissance (Mass MoCA #161), Great Falls at Dawn for Xu Bing (Mass MoCA #180), and Oxbow II, for Frank Moore and Dan Hodermarsky (Mass MoCA #207), bear his signature, novel technique of working with acrylics, resin, pasted papers and photographs, specialized brushes, and power sanders to produce light effects unrivaled in painting. Stephen Hannock’s approach involves layering subtly modulated acrylic or oil paint across the support, repeated polishing with sanders, and veneers of reflective resin burnished to a matte sheen allowing light to penetrate the stratum of the picture and reflect back with exceptional illumination. Pasted materials are fixed in the layers in the tradition of papiers collés, a method introduced by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque a century ago. The pictures are also covered with handwritten text—comments on locations imaged, giving histories either personal to the artist or relevant to the sites. Stephen Hannock works these lines of text, which are not preconceived, into the topography of the image.
Other works feature motifs of flooded rivers and soaring rockets, drawing on the rich English landscape traditions of J.M.W. Turner and James McNeill Whistler, and Waiting for Ophelia (Mass MoCA #205), inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite work of John Everett Millais.
Stephen Hannock’s work is found in public collections throughout the United States, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Yale University Art Gallery, and numerous other collections.
Jason Rosenfeld, Ph.D., Distinguished Chair and Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College, New York, has curated the exhibition. A fully illustrated colour catalogue, with essays and entries on the pictures by Dr. Rosenfeld is available.
MARLBOROUGH FINE ART
6 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BY
www.marlboroughfineart.com
