Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Sketch of Tiled Skin Face Mask

Trenton Doyle Hancock
1974-

Sketch of Tiled Skin Face Mask

2014
15 x 12 inches (38.1 x 30.5 cm)
Pen and ink over graphite pencil.
2018.67

Gift of Martina Yamin

© Trenton Doyle Hancock 2021. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York.
Notes
As a young boy in Paris, Texas, Trenton Doyle Hancock invented a Black superhero called Torpedo Boy. This character, the artist's avatar, would later join the Moundverse, a complex mythological universe of Hancock's creation. The story of the half-human, half-plant Mounds, their nemeses the Vegans, and the flawed protagonist Torpedo Boy, is interleaved with the artist's childhood influences--the Bible, comic books, and action figures--and his later admiration for artists like Philip Guston, particularly Guston's cartoonish paintings of hooded Ku Klux Klan figures. "Sketch of Tiled Skin Face Mask" is part of a shift away from the Moundverse and toward more directly autobiographical art. The figure, which may be a self-portrait, is endowed with a third, all-seeing eye. He gazes at the viewer from behind a pattern that resembles a chain link fence, but in fact refers to the tile floor that covered Hancock's grandmother's home when he was a child. He remembers it as the place where he first learned to draw.
Classification
Century Drawings