In his eighth solo exhibition with James Cohan, Trenton Doyle Hancock presents a series of new paintings that represent an expansion of The Exchange, depicting an imagined meeting between the artist’s alter ego Torpedo Boy, a Black superhero, and the buffoonish Klansmen that populated Philip Guston’s paintings. Hancock prizes the ambiguity and the mutability of this moment, and has returned to it again and again. As he notes: “The more you dissect the image, the more it becomes fraught with historic tension and with my own history as a painter. It keeps feeding itself as an image. The item that is exchanged between them changes the narrative each time.”

This body of new work is presented as a conceptual extension of his concurrent major museum exhibition, Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston, which is on view at The Jewish Museum in New York from November 8, 2024, through March 30, 2025. This immersive presentation, co-curated by Hancock, will explore the artists’ shared commitment to investigating the legacy of white supremacy in the United States in ways that are both emotionally raw and deeply humorous.