Teun Hocks

1947 - 2022.

Teun Hocks was a founder and icon of Dutch staged photography. He acquired cult status with his tragicomic works of art that were somewhere between photography and painting. Since 1975, Hocks worked tirelessly on an idiosyncratic oeuvre of works that tell a whole story in a single image, often with a good dose of humour. Hocks himself was the protagonist in the tragicomic worlds he created. The large-scale, hand-colorued photos were his stage, on which he took on the role of a man who finds himself in almost surreal situations. Hocks didn't play the archetypal hero who fearlessly takes on the most unlikely of challenges; he was just the ordinary person who took on everything with a certain acceptance and defeat.TORCH's last exhibition with Hocks was Drawings in the spring of 2021, showing a selection of drawings he had made the year before while in isolation at his home in central France. His drawings have often been overlooked by the general public, but Hocks drew all throughout his life, and also taught drawing at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Design Academy Eindhoven.