Drawings and Paintings

Oil on canvas

Through pop-amalgams of comic strip, op art and referrals back to the density and detail in composition of artists such as Dürer or Bruegel the Elder, Hancock forms complex, sprawling drawings such as “Cave Scape 3” that offer a commentary on morality, good versus evil, and the breaking points between imagination and reality. Here, the reoccurring ‘Mounds’ (a creature both animal and plant that features across many of Hancock’s works) have been sunken into a landscape that modulates and oozes as mud or viscous liquid, the land scattered with objects that equally evoke a playground or rubbish heap.

The complexity and fantastical detail of “Chimerical” is defined through Aldrich’s process of collage as a grounds for the re-appreciation of art; slicing & recombining images from a wide array of pre-20th century engravings, illustrations and prints. The work is softly surreal in its combination of imagery and underlying meaning — the strange hybridity of the Chimera in these illustrative representations again at odds with the classical and often geometric landscapes repeated behind them — but also carefully ordered, categorised and structured to Aldrich’s specification, which evolved in the 1990s when working alongside the collagist Fredrick Sommer. Framed size 32.75 x 42 Inches

Conscious Energy/ E=01