BOLOGNA, ITALY.-Galleria Marabini presents Trenton Doyle Hancock's first personal exhibition in Europe in a private space. He is an Afro-American artist who, despite his youth, has already a lead role in the international
art scene.

The artist presents a multidisciplinary project realized ad hoc for the exhibition space inside the Ex-Church which includes big canvasses and a series of different sized drawings. All these works are realized in mixed media with incorporation of waste items such as plastic and synthetic fibre on the canvas and paper. The artist himself paints the walls of the exhibition space with texts referred to the images describing an imaginary battle between good and evil.

Starting out as a comic strip artist, Trenton Doyle Hancock only began creating art when he was convinced that he had found "a painting project in which I could freely jump between modes of production and maintain a set of characters that inhabit the work".

In fact, each of Hancock's works of art is a contribution to the comprehensive tale of the Mouds saga, mythical creatures that are half animal and half plant, whose vicissitudes depict an allegory of the eternal battle between good and evil. The artist's prints, drawings and collages add from time to time new episodes to this epic tale representing birth, life, death, the afterlife and even the dreamlike states of these creatures.

Influenced by the history of painting, especially Abstract Expressionism, Hancock transforms traditionally formal decisions (such as the use of language, colour and patterns) to create new characters, develop secondary plots and express symbolic meanings. Hancock articulates the poisonous conflict between sex, race and culture with refined ugliness and a fascinating indulgence worthy of Flemish Hieronymus Bosch. With artistic touches that in the same way recall William Blake and Yves Tanguy, Hancock has developed a style that even incorporates biblical elements, with references to religious stories that the artist learned as a child from his family and the local ecclesiastic community. Balancing moral dilemmas with humor and through a musical sense of language and colour, Hancock's works create a pictorial space with a
psychological dimension.

Trenton Doyle Hancock, born in 1974, Oklahoma City, OK, USA, exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in 2000 and 2002, becoming one of the youngest artists in history to participate in this prestigious exhibition. His work has been the subject of monographic exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston and at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2001. In 2003 he exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami and at the Biennials of Lyon and Istanbul.

In 2007, the itinerant exhibition The Wayward Thinker brought the works of Hancock to Europe for the first time, before at the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh and then at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

Decorated with many acknowledgements, Hancock lives and works in Houston where, in 2002, he was Resident Artist at the Glassell School of Art of the Museum of Fine Arts.