Day In, Day Out

We are pleased to announce ‘Day In, Day Out’, the new solo exhibition of Teun Hocks at TORCH gallery. Opening on Saturday 23 February, it consists of ten new photo-paintings that Hocks made during the last two years. He is known for his humorous self portraits, where he uses oil paint to hand color the black and white photos he made with an analogue camera. Since the 1980s his working method has been consistent, and this new series proves that Hocks fantasy is as lively as ever. An overview of his work since the early beginnings to his latest work can be seen at the exhibition ‘Early to Late’ at Stedelijk Museum Breda, coinciding with the show at our gallery. Together with the museum, we published a new catalog, available in the gallery and the museum.

Teun Hocks is one of the founders and iconic artists of staged photography in the Netherlands. Although he started out as a performance- and video-artist he quickly found footing as part of a group of photographers who tried to reinvent their medium in a theatrical way during the eighties. Ever since Hocks has been making works that exist somewhere between photography and painting and between performance and self-portraiture. In his studio he constructs a stage with a painted backdrop. He then poses himself on this stage and takes a black and white photograph of the scene using an old camera with a timer. The resulting silver gelatin print is hand-colored by the artist using oil paint. This peculiar technique gives his work an oddly timeless quality, atypical for photographs of performances.

Hocks himself usually features as the main actor in his work, although there do exist a few rare pieces where the artist is nowhere to be found. Still, the subject matter is never of a personal nature. His works are concerned with a concept of the everyman. In his works Hocks portrays a rather sheepish, unremarkable guy. This 'everyman' bears the attributes of powerless citizenship; a drab gray suit, a beaten suitcase and a hat which seems to be permanently adrift. This character ends up facing very improbable dilemmas in a world that can best be described as a dreamed version of Dutch village life. He perseveres through these tests with a compassionate but weary smile on his face, implicitly telling stories of global problems on a human scale. Through his character Hocks also refers to the remarkable foundations of art itself; the structure of illusions and assumptions which are needed to understand the history of western art history.

Teun Hocks (1947) lives and works in France. His work is represented by TORCH gallery in Amsterdam, Fahey Klein in Los Angeles, Patricia Dorfmann in Paris and Paci Contemporary in Italy. His work is exhibited worldwide and is part of a large number of institutional and private collections.