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 paleontology, 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 color 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. The painting process remains visible in the final image, which juxtaposes fine, schematic areas with 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 earned a PhD in Philosophy, writing about non-linear systems in the thought of George Bataille and Michel Serres, among 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. Cooke’s work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; British Council Collection, London; Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; and Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.
