Professor Jason Rosenfeld Curates an Exhibition of Stephen Hannock’s Work in Recent Paintings: Vistas with Text for Marlborough Gallery

Hannock, born in Albany, N.Y., in 1951, began his career as an apprentice to Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) while studying art on exchange at Smith College. His 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, Hannock moved to Manhattan and fully engaged with the downtown contemporary art scene. Landscape has since been his predominant motif, coupled with an evolving mastery of technique resulting in paintings that appear to glow from within. 

Recent Paintings: Vistas with Text features four new paintings of polished mixed media on canvas. All bear Hannock’s signature, novel technique of working with acrylics, resin, pasted papers and photographs, specialized brushes and power sanders to produce light effects unrivaled in painting. Hannock’s approach, explicated in the exhibition’s Process Room, involves layering subtly modulated acrylic paint across canvases, 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 layers in the tradition of papiers collés, a method employed by Picasso and Braque. The pictures are also covered with handwritten text—comments on locations imaged, giving histories either personal to the artist or relevant to the sites. Hannock works these lines of text, which are not preconceived, into the topography of the image. 

The exhibition has been a collaboration between Dr. Rosenfeld and his former student Max Levai ’11, a recent MMC art history graduate and director of Marlborough Gallery at the branch in Chelsea, one of the world’s leading contemporary art galleries. Levai’s great-uncle, Frank Lloyd, was a founder of Marlborough in London in 1946. Marlborough has expanded to include three other major galleries in Madrid, Monte Carlo and Santiago. 

As a Distinguished Chair, Rosenfeld was also invited by Tate Britain in London, the national gallery of British art, to co-curate an exhibition on the art of English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood from the late 19th century. This exhibition will open in London in fall 2012 and travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2013, followed by the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow that summer, and making its final stop at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. 

Published: May 18, 2013