Nigel Cooke

Background

Nigel Cooke was born in 1973, in Manchester, United Kingdom.

Education

Initially, Nigel attended Stockport College and then, from 1991 to 1994, studied at Nottingham Trent University, School of Art and Design, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine Art. Later, between 1995 and 1997, he studied at the Royal College of Art in London, graduating with a Master of Arts degree in Painting. During the period from 1998 and 2004, Cooke attended Goldsmiths, University of London, where he attained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Fine Art.

It's worth noting, that, during his time in Essex, Nigel became acquainted with artists Jake and Dinos Chapman, who gave him his first solo exhibition at Chapman Fine Arts Gallery, London, in 2000.

Career

Cooke's first creative impulse came, when he inherited his grandfather's easel and paints. At first, he had no interest in art or painting, but decided to try it in memory of his grandfather, who had been an amateur painter. Cooke realized he wasn't any good and was surprised at how challenging it was to recreate imagery through painting. This challenge became an addiction, a longing to discover.

Later, Cooke began his lengthy education. He attended several educational establishments in the United Kingdom and finally received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, the University of London in 2004. It was during his student years, that Cooke began to make a name for himself as an artist with a series of surreal scenes, showing a mixture of influences from Sublime images and 18th-century landscape painting, to Contemporary ideas on entropy.

Throughout his career, Nigel has had a number of solo exhibitions, including those, held at Chapman Fine Arts Gallery, London, (2000), Tate Britain, London (2004), Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York City (2004, 2009), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2006), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2007), Blum & Poe Gallery, Los Angeles (2010) and others.

Besides, the painter's works have been included in group exhibitions at various institutions, including Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2004), MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien), Vienna (2007), Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe, Germany (2007), Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Herzliya, Israel (2013), and others.

In 2012, Cooke published his first book, "Words", which explores the influence of pop culture and mass media, the idea of painting reality and the authenticity of painting in an era, in which authenticity is often overlooked.

Currently, besides his work as a painter, Cooke also holds the post of a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art in London, where he had studied earlier. He resides in Kent.

Achievements

• Nigel Cooke is a well-known figurative artist, who gained prominence for his large-scale fantastical scenes of decaying urban landscapes. His works thematically explore the meeting point between creative labour, consciousness, art history, consumer culture and nature, and evoke images from the Flemish Renaissance, Contemporary Graffiti Art and styles similar to that of graphic novels.
  
  Nigel's works are kept in collections of major museums, including the Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Words

    (British artist Nigel Cooke has won international acclaim ...)

    2012

• painting

  • Athlete (detail)

  • Sunset Bathers

  • Lovers in the Medici Garden

  • Artist's Garden 2

  • Deer in Fall

  • The Triumph of Pan (After Poussin)

  • Mosquito

  • Roman Willow (Night Swimmer)

  • Salome

  • Smoking Lovers

  • Spanish Blossom

  • Mexican Garden

  • Embers

  • Night Swimmer

  • Skipper

  • Sunrise

  • Mimosa

  • Laughing, Screaming

  • Indian Summer

  • Blind Philosopher

  • Black Butterfly

  • Frozen Waterfall

  • Washed Up Thinker

  • Economimesis

  • I'm All Over It

  • Scandalous Magic Par Excellence

  • Painter's Deathbed

Views

Cooke's work has primarily centered on meticulously painted, large-scale urban landscapes, which he calls "hybrid theatrical spaces". Employing disparate styles and often integrating trompe l'oeil depictions of miniature rocks and trees with backdrops of decaying, graffiti-marked buildings, Cooke creates environments, that tend to convey obscure and macabre narratives.

In Cooke's "Ghost on the Happy Trail" (2003), cartoon brains and schematic birds traipse across empty lots, studded with jack-o'-lanterns and buried human heads. In "The Artist's Garden" (2006), the hyperreal detail, present in other works, gives way to an ultimately flat rendering of penciled forms against a gold backdrop. The work combines Byzantine stylistic elements with the ubiquitous flatness of mid-century modern painting in an indirect acknowledgment, that the flatness, associated with the death of painting, is not a modern or new convention. More recent works, such as "Experience" (2009), depict scenes of lone artists, endowed with beards, generally associated with ancient philosophers, in slightly menacing, yet weary poses. As in his past landscapes, in these works, Cooke continues to focus on concepts of creative exhaustion.

Nigel's paintings imply a strong sense of foreboding both through the depicted forms, such as skulls and derelict buildings, and also through his use of colour, which often features bilious toxic greens. The paintings develop and change over a protracted period of time and are built up through many layers of oil paint. They often balance different languages of paint within the same canvas. Vast areas of colour are combined with obsessively detailed figuration and in recent works Cooke has incorporated large sweeping gestural marks into his compositions.

Quotations: "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."

References

• Nigel Cooke This work represents an in-depth look at the work and career of Nigel Cooke, who is having a profound impact on contemporary painting.
  2016
• Nigel Cooke
  2011