Nigel Cooke

Nigel Cooke irreverently combines the techniques of miniature painting with the gestures of Color Field and landscape painting. The work, however, is far more than a simple combination of painting genres and styles. It is, among other things, a conversation with the history of painting that extends to the point of being ahistorical. While figurative painters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have struggled with the concept of "the death of painting," Cooke revitalizes outmoded painting methods to create grim works about the reality of mortality.

The pristine surface of a Cooke painting may at first appear to be airbrushed, but in truth, the artist has painstakingly applied pigment with a tiny brush. Due to Cooke's exacting process, the completion of each enormous canvas can take months. The artist's vision, which is often referred to as entropic, creates a strange dimension hovering somewhere between imagination and solid ground. The details of the everyday—dilapidated buildings, sprawling graffiti, and urban decay—make for sublime, yet macabre paintings.

Cooke was born in Cheshire, England, and has recently relocated his home and studio from London to Canterbury. He received his MA in Painting in 1997 from the Royal College of Art and his PhD in Fine Art in 2004 from Goldsmith's College in London. In 2004 he had a solo exhibition, Art Now, at Tate Britain in London, and his work has been included in group exhibitions in Israel, the United States, Venezuela, Brazil, and Spain. Cooke's work is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Tate Modern, London; and the British Council, London.

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Nigel Cooke