Nigel Cooke @ Pace Gallery Seoul - "Sea Mirror" Exhibition

Nigel Cooke: Sea Mirror 

Pace Gallery Seoul 

Through May 17, 2025

Nigel Cooke 

Rilke in Rome, 2025 

Oil on linen, 130.5 x 165 cm 

© Nigel Cooke, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents Sea Mirror, an exhibition of new work by Nigel Cooke, at its gallery in Seoul. This show brings together never-before-seen canvases created as part of Cooke’s new experimentations with portrait formats and panoramic scales, as well as a selection of 11 paintings on paper produced on the Spanish island of Formentera. With Sea Mirror Nigel Cooke continues his explorations of memory, myth, and the passage of time through his distinctive visual vocabulary of gesture and touch.

Nigel Cooke is renowned for his evocative, atmospheric paintings that blend figurative and abstract forms within layered compositions. Drawing inspiration from a diverse range of subjects—including literature, paleontology, neuroscience, mythology, and zoology—his work merges personal narratives with broader cultural and natural histories. Through intricate networks of calligraphic marks, Cooke explores the intersection of painting, thinking, and perception, where image and meaning emerge from the convergence of disparate elements to create portraits of psychological and physical spaces alike. His intuitive process is often guided by his experiences in different parts of the world and other autobiographical material, and his works can be found in major collections and institutions around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Tate in London, the Pinault Collection in Paris, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Long Museum in Shanghai, among others. 

In his latest body of work, Nigel Cooke has departed from the bold colors and graphic mark making that have characterized his paintings in recent years. Rendered in cool tones, his new paintings on canvas and on paper, created across Iceland and Spain, are softer, more contemplative and vulnerable compositions than his previous works. Featuring impressionistic lines that flow and emanate across their surfaces, Cooke’s Sea Mirror paintings can be understood in conversation with works by Titian, Rubens, Turner, and other great painters in London’s National Gallery. As ever, one of the central concerns of his practice is the mystery of painting itself—its timelessness, its narrative power, and its emotional and psychological depth.  

A suite of 11 new paintings on paper, created on the Spanish island of Formentera, complements the paintings on view in Sea Mirror. Deeply connected to his recent travels in Iceland, where he painted waterfalls on a daily basis, and his time spent in Formentera, these compositions meditate on notions of transience and transformation, of impermanence and renewal. Creating this group of gouaches on paper on Formentera’s beaches, Nigel Cooke made use of seawater as a material in their production, imbuing each work with the spirit and rhythm of the Mediterranean Sea. In this way, the artist continues his investigations into the poetic resonances of tidal movements and the ways that bodies of water—ever-moving and ever-disappearing—can metaphorically reflect the creative process. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue from Pace Publishing featuring new texts by writer Chloe Aridjis and Marcelle Polednik, director of the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin.

Nigel Cooke (b. 1973) is known for evocative works that merge figurative forms with abstract and elemental atmospherics. Since the late 1990s, Nigel 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.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

Nigel Cooke @ Buchmann Galerie, Berlin - Spring in Fialta

Nigel Cooke: Spring in Fialta
Buchmann Galerie, Berlin
Through 29 June 2019

Buchmann Galerie presents NIGEL COOKE ’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Nigel Cooke (born 1973 in Manchester, UK, lives and works in Kent, UK) is one of the most prominent painters of his generation. His large-format tableaus captivate with breath-taking combinations of figurative and abstract elements. Nigel Cooke creates contemporary visionary landscapes - epic yet highly personal paintings created from a combination of memory, imagination and intuition. Set in complex spaces lit with strange and sometimes toxic nuances of color, these images are often populated by fragmented or distorted figures - composite beings who move through the space whilst also seeming to merge with it.

Nigel Cooke’s approach to painting - as a process, as an object and as an image - questions, rewrites and undermines itself in the process of becoming a finished work. This process serves as much to corrupt the image as to depict it, creating instability on both physical and psychological levels. The works have echoes of many of the gestures and images persistent in art history, but re-organise them with a new kind of tension, becoming a complex equation of gestures, techniques and possibilities that explore the full vocabulary of painting. The almost symphonic range of marks and lines in the works attempts to capture the complexity of lived experience in a psychologically layered whole. In the artist’s words, a painting raises a question – “what’s the difference between painting and thinking, or painting and looking, or painting and living? In a way, a painting sits on a junction of all those things … It’s almost as if the point where those things meet suggests an image.” [1] 

In the new group of works presented, Nigel Cooke further reduces his compositions, reaching a point of almost complete abstraction. The works reflect his impressions of landscapes he has visited, recreating, for example in Beach Fires, the faded recollections of people gathering by the beach at night around several lit fires. The smaller-scale canvases Borca, Isella and Fornarelli are highly personal, abstracted and painterly transformations of Nigel Cooke’s visual memories and emotions from travel in Northern Italy.

The large canvases are characterized by a central positioning of figures, arranged in impressive natural compositions that define the dynamic of the image. Nigel Cooke paints these semi-abstract figures with fine, thread-like lines, giving them a sense of weightlessness and supernatural transparency. However, as they merge into each other, the sum of their appearances and movements ultimately gives the composition a visually monumental quality. The works recall the many instances of the Bathers theme in art history, in particular its link with the emergence of abstraction through the work of Cezanne, Picasso and others. In both surface and setting, Spring Bathers most vividly connects here, but is presented more as a personal memory than a strict visual reference, unstable, fading in and out. The theme strikes a note of familiarity, prioritising examination of how the work is made over references or narrative. 

The works on paper bear witness to Nigel Cooke’s very process of painting and the formal research that feeds it, where the artist explores variants of light and color in the form of abstract vignettes, each bursting with colour contrasts and dynamic, almost confessional gestures.

Nigel Cooke’s attempt to create an evocative and multi-layered language, rich in associations and yet highly subjective, creates works that feed on the artist’s and the viewer’s memories - at once exquisite and disturbing, familiar and sublime.

Nigel Cooke’s work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Tate, London; British Council, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

[1] Nigel Cooke, Darian Leader in conversation with Nigel Cooke, p. 8, Phaidon Press Ltd.; London 2016

BUCHMANN GALERIE
Charlottenstrasse 13, 10969 Berlin
www.buchmanngalerie.com