For my further artistic practice I would like research the accelerating effect the implementation of digital technology and algorithms has on an individual.
For my further artistic practice I would like research the accelerating effect the implementation of digital technology and algorithms has on an individual.
Artworks and Processes
Artworks and Processes
Artworks and Processes
Artworks and Processes
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Ich bin ein Textabschnit. Klicke hier, um deinen eigenen Text hinzuzufügen und mich zu bearbeiten. Ich bin ein Textabschnitt. Klicke hier, um deinen eigenen Text hinzuzufügen und mich zu bearbeiten.Ich bin ein Textabschnitt. Klicke hier, um deinen eigenen Text hinzuzufügen und mich zu bearbeiten.Ich bin ein Textabschnitt. Ich bin ein Textabschnitt. Klicke hier, um deinen eigenen Text hinzuzufügen und mich zu bearbeiten. Ich bin ein Textabschnitt. Klicke hier, um deinen eigenen Text hinzuzufügen und mich zu bearbeiten.Ich bin ein Textabschnitt. Klicke hier, um deinen eigenen Text hinzuzufügen und mich zu bearbeiten.Ich bin ein Textabschnitt.
Here is a heading
Ich bin ein Textabschnit. Klicke hier, um deinen eigenen Text hinzuzufügen und mich zu bearbeiten. Ich bin ein Textabschnitt. Klicke hier, um deinen eigenen Text hinzuzufügen und mich zu bearbeiten.Ich bin ein Textabschnitt. Klicke hier, um deinen eigenen Text hinzuzufügen und mich zu bearbeiten.Ich bin ein Textabschnitt. Ich bin ein Textabschnitt. Klicke hier, um deinen eigenen Text hinzuzufügen und mich zu bearbeiten. Ich bin ein Textabschnitt. Klicke hier, um deinen eigenen Text hinzuzufügen und mich zu bearbeiten.Ich bin ein Textabschnitt. Klicke hier, um deinen eigenen Text hinzuzufügen und mich zu bearbeiten.Ich bin ein Textabschnitt.
Nigel Cooke
© Nigel Cooke, Sunlight, 2019, oil and acrylic on linen
“The entire philosophy of what it is I am doing has been adjusted.”
– Nigel Cooke
stretching boundaries of figurative painting
ambiguity and fragmentation
hallucinatory realms full of discontinuities
energetic systems
folding dualities
instability and tension
energetic and abstract figuration
matrix of lines
human extremes
Artists website → http://nigelcooke.net/
Writer Dan Fox notes about the artist’s recent shift to abstraction in his essay Past Imperfect: “He keeps his mistakes and hesitancies visible as faded or muddied marks. This is a painterly language evolving as it is being written; past, present, and future tenses acting on each other simultaneously.” (Westall, 2020)
“Nigel Cooke is known for evocative works that merge the painted forms of constructed and natural worlds with individual consciousness”(Westall, 2020). Since the late 1990s he has explored and stretched the boundaries of figurative painting. He has used ambiguity and fragmentation as strategies in his painting to collapse the distinction between genres such as abstraction, figuration, landscape, and still life. Cooke combines representation based on careful observation and impressionistic, poetic imagery creating “hallucinatory realms full of pictorial and conceptual discontinuities. (…) In his visually detailed and symbolically complex works, figures are not individual portraits but composites – combinations of perception, invention, and allusion” (Westall, 2020). Now his works become energetic systems that have their own nature and inner logic. (Pace,2020; Westall, 2020)
He folds dualities as the mind and body, or the human brain and the natural world, into a single fluid gesture. An instability and ambiguity is created through organic abstractions and movement in the image but it remains balanced and 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 (Pace).”
New Paintings (2020)
Exhibition, Pace Gallery, New York
January 31st - February 29th 2020
Selected works from "New Paintings"
His new large-scale paintings mark a significant shift toward a more performative, energetic, and abstract approach to figuration. During his recent residency in NY Cooke remarked that “the entire philosophy of what it is I am doing has been adjusted.” Now his works, that reference actions, places, and people, exist as matrices in which the artist’s free and open process meets wider themes of metaphor, spirit, nature, representation, and the living material quality of paint. (Pace, 2020)
“I am interested in taking the painting on a journey to arrive at somewhere new, experiencing it in a linear way that allows lines to accumulate and the paint to build up in significant areas. What I end up with is not strictly a figure but a matrix of lines that come in and out of a description of human forms, but that also slips into animal, plant, and landscape intonations. These hybrid crossover suggestions make me think of certain human extremes: an athlete at full tilt, the throes of love, the staring at a void. Fangs, horns, ears and glowing eyes can somehow spring into the image too, and I allow these in as associations of the human condition, classical and mythological images of transformation and omnipotence, and metaphors for the trials of human experience that have remained relevant to western culture for hundreds of years.”
(Nigel Cooke, 2020)
The artists studio
The artists in his studio
Nigel Cooke
The Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas, USA 21 October 2011 – 18 February 2012
Nigel Cooke, The Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas
Cookes paintings construct a dark and melancholic world as a deeply psychologized landscape populated by disaffected artists, philosophers, and a host of anthropomorphized and dejected foodstuffs. They are martyrs to the existential melodrama of abstract thought, haunting a tired, post-industrial frontier where nature and creative endeavor collide in both landscape and mindscape. (Art-Agenda, 2011)
Key Takeaways
I think Cooks work is very relevant to me because he merges constructed and natural worlds with his individual consciousness. To see his development from highly figurative works to new compositions of bold vivid lines that describe a body, an object, or a surface makes me think about my own use of the figure in my paintings.
The way he still describes bodies without directly depicting them – just by hinting at them with the shape of an arm or a shoulder in the negative space – opens up a whole new way of experimenting from the figure. In this free use of the body as starting point I see his work as connected to Glenn Brown and Justin Mortimer.
References
Art-Agenda (2011) Nigel Cooke at The Goss-Michael Foundation. Available at: https://www.art-agenda.com/announcements/187729/nigel-cooke-at-the-goss-michael-foundation (Accessed: 21.05.22)
Cook, N (no date) About. Available at: http://nigelcooke.net/ (Accessed: 21.05.22)
Pace (no date) Nigel Cook. Available at: https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/nigel-cooke/ (Accessed: 21.05.22)
Westall, M (2020) Nigel Cooke Midnights, A Solo Exhibition. Available at: https://fadmagazine.com/2020/05/15/nigel-cooke-midnights-a-solo-exhibition/ (Accessed: 21.05.22)