LONDON.- Pace is presenting a solo exhibition of new work by the British painter, spanning the entirety of the Hanover Square gallery.
Marking the artist’s first exhibition with the London gallery in six years, this new body of work signals a significant moment for Cooke as he brings his expansive abstract paintings to London for the first time since his practice shifted in 2019. The exhibition’s title refers both to a world map – synonymous with travel and adventure – and the Ancient Greek Titan, condemned to carry the heavens on his shoulders for eternity, at once colossal and immaterial. Cooke reimagines the icon with a delicate, diaphanous creature, reflecting his own interrogation of the immense and microscopic systems that govern the natural world.
Inspired by Cooke’s travels and encounters with wildlife at home and overseas, this new body of work layers dynamic forms with a mutating array of animal and landscape associations. At the centre of Cooke’s practice is a fascination with the way information travels from the brain, through the body and nervous system, onto the canvas and back again. His work is a philosophical examination of the ways in which consciousness and subconsciousness interact to create a painting. Where previously his paintings would layer complex lines, forms, and shapes to create work that hovered between abstraction and figuration, recent years have seen a loosening of Cooke’s dynamic visual lexicon as the artist refines his exploration of the questions that have propelled his practice for more than 25 years. The intricate, sinuous web of lines built up over raw canvas recalls a wide array of imagery, from neural networks to crashing sea against rough sand. The large-scale paintings hold a bodily quality that relates both to Cooke’s own physical range of motion and the viewers’, as they are enveloped into the abstract field.
The suite of paintings and works on paper presented in Atlas with Butterfly began with a chance spotting of a pelican landing on the smooth surface of the Atlantic Ocean from a Miami beach. Struck by the primordial bird, the textured ripple of the water, and the jewel-toned colours glittering in the golden light, Cooke began crafting this latest body of work, explaining that the scene “moved me in ways I couldn’t figure out. … The impact of the bird had the force of truth - a brute fact, an echo of evolution, a ring of the eternal. The colours stayed pulsing in For immediate release my mind.” Certainly, Cooke’s colours throb with intensity: Tigral is a whirl of searing oranges and reds brought to life by a lightning storm of yellow.
These new works showcase Cooke’s heightened and focused engagement with colour, which lends the compositions a new emotive charge. Cooke builds his canvases in a manner akin to classical painting techniques, working from dark to light, from fine to impasto brushstrokes, to create an elegant illusory quality in the abstraction as if the paintings stretch through space. Indeed, Cooke’s exploration of line is reminiscent of pentimenti from an Old Masters painting, imbuing his works with a palimpsestic and temporal feel. Cooke’s expert combination of colours and tones is a distillation of atmospheric effects observed in specific geographical settings. With each work carrying a title that distorts Latin taxonomies, these paintings explore how the act of painting can mirror our relationship to nature. More specifically, how the natural world is not a distant vista to be observed, but an ecosystem with its own ideas about us, how it is not a site of projection and contemplation, but a mass of lives that look and think back at us indifferently. Ultimately, the painterly ambiguity then becomes a form of travel between people, continents, and species at once.
Nigel Cooke is known for evocative works that merge figurative forms with abstract and elemental atmospherics.
Since the late 1990s, Cooke has explored and stretched the boundaries of figurative painting, creating a highly diverse and distinctive body of work. More recently, his work has assessed this output, moving into a succinct language with which to investigate his wide range of interests.
Informed by a range of fields from palaeontology, neuroscience, classical mythology and zoology, the linear construction of Cooke’s latest paintings recalls brain circuitry, the human or animal body and landscape formations simultaneously. The artist is interested in folding familiar dualities such as the mind and body, or the human brain and the natural world, into a single fluid gesture. His organic abstractions are loaded with mammalian and geological fragments, creating an instability and movement in the image as well as an ambiguity between a vast array of natural associations.
Using notational sketches and paintings made on location at various sites around the world, Cooke distills his impressions of specific places and the people in them into a personal vocabulary of forms that evolves and repeats through time, with autobiographical material often infusing and directing the process. Developing an emotive and highly focused use of colour alongside these forms, Cooke’s calligraphic images are delicately balanced, with structure and collapse held together in a state of tension. The paintings contrast staining techniques on raw linen with classical techniques of layering and spatial depth, indebted to both abstract expressionism and the figurative compositions of European Classicism. Much of the work’s rehearsals and revisions are visible in the final image, which play fine, schematic areas against passages of gestural impasto. Cooke’s background in masterfully executed figurative painting provides the sense of drawing and representational rendering that permeate the abstract marks. In their unfixed and writhing otherness, they engage with the self as a porous system, in flux between animal states and prehistory, between the inner life and the ecosystems of the world at large.
Nigel Cooke studied at the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths College, where he gained a PhD in Philosophy, writing about non-linear systems in the thought of George Bataille, Michel Serres and others. Making often atypical connections between disparate fields - cave paintings and surrealism, insect mimicry and information physics - his theoretical writings ultimately explored representation as a function of the natural world, and formed the basis of his conception of the value of painting and its possibilities.
His paintings are held in several of the world’s major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Astrup Fearnely Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo; Milwaukee Art Museum.
