Title
Round
Color silkscreen
30 x 40 inches
Estimated Value Range:
$1,800 - $2,400
Starting Bid: $900
Bidding increments: $100
Teun Hocks (b. 1947, Leiden – d. 2022, Rotterdam) was internationally celebrated for his tragicomic photo-paintings—works that combined photography, performance, and painting into richly staged tableaux. A pioneer of staged photography, Hocks became known for portraying himself as the resigned, endearing anti-hero in meticulously crafted theatrical scenes. His dreamlike, slightly absurd environments often placed an ordinary man—himself—amid surreal tasks or ambiguous predicaments. These worlds, rendered in black-and-white photography and hand-colored with oil paint (or digitally in later works), toe the line between humor and melancholy, clarity and mystery.
Hocks’ works emerged from carefully developed drawings that explored visually interesting, surreal, or droll situations. These sketches served as blueprints for the elaborate sets he built in his studio. Once constructed, Hocks photographed himself within the scene using analogue black-and-white photography, then hand-painted the resulting prints in delicate layers of oil. In later years, he began digitally coloring his photos to create editioned works while preserving the painterly aesthetic of his practice.
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Teun Hocks
Artist Statement & Approach
Hocks never saw himself as a traditional storyteller. “Because the basis of my work is a staged scene, the image suggests that it involves an event that actually happened in reality,” he explained. But rather than offer a clear narrative, Hocks aimed to create open-ended situations, seldom titling his works to encourage individual interpretation. Each image feels like a moment suspended in time—something is about to go wrong, or perhaps has just gone awry. The result is work that is at once deeply human, oddly comic, and subtly unsettling.
Critic Ken Johnson, writing in The New York Times, captured the poetic tension in Hocks’ work:
“Teun Hocks’ works are truly profound, like the one of an artist who, unaware of the sun burning on the horizon behind him, focuses on the candle light in his hand—a metaphor, perhaps, about the human limits of spiritual perception.”
About the Artist
Hocks studied at the St. Joost Academy in Breda from 1966 to 1970, and was active early on in performance and collaborative art projects. While many artists in the Netherlands during the 1970s leaned into conceptualism, Hocks pursued a more accessible, visual storytelling approach. His early photo-performances eventually led to the hybrid photo-paintings that defined his mature work.
Over his career, Hocks exhibited internationally and became an icon of Dutch staged photography. His work appeared in solo and group exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States, and he earned cult status for his unique ability to bridge photography and painting with narrative poignancy.
Legacy & Final Years
In the spring of 2021, Hocks held his final exhibition, Drawings, at TORCH Gallery. It featured works made during his period of isolation at home in central France—testament to his lifelong commitment to drawing, a practice that often remained in the background of his more well-known photographic works. Hocks also contributed as an educator, teaching drawing at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Design Academy Eindhoven.
Teun Hocks leaves behind a legacy of work that defies easy categorization—simultaneously staged and spontaneous, humorous and haunting. His images invite us to pause, reflect, and imagine the stories unfolding within.
