HASTINGS.- Jerwood Gallery will premiere previously unseen and new works by critically acclaimed artist Nigel Cooke in an exhibition entitled Painter’s Beach Club.

The Jerwood Gallery show is something of a homecoming for Cooke - who mixes music, the weather and memories of growing up in Manchester to create his work - as Hastings is where he first had his paintings shown as a professional artist.
Cooke says: “Coming back to Hastings after many adventures - in painting and the art world in general - to mount a show, has the feel of an odyssey. That’s the thing about painting; no matter how far you think you travel, you always end up back at the beginning.”

He adds: “A lot of my work has the shoreline as its location and, because Jerwood Gallery is by the sea, I wanted to focus on this aspect. Like all of us straining to get to the beach when the sun is out, I like to set my paintings at a similar frontier, an idealistic background that the painting can react to.”

In his exhibition Painter’s Beach Club at Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, Cooke will be showing works previously unseen in a public gallery in the UK, paintings that the New York Times described as combining ‘Magic Realist illusion, post-apocalyptic fantasy and extreme shifts of scale.’

Cooke’s paintings, frequently on monumental canvases measuring up to 6’ by 12’, feature somewhat dystopian landscapes, peopled by a variety of oddball and yet recognisable characters. Each painting demands close inspection as, among the weeds, stones and rubble we discover graffiti-like slogans, motifs and painterly references to his artistic heroes, such as Francis Bacon, Velazquez and Goya. Cooke likes to work at close range and at a distance, so it often seems like each painting contains many smaller ones within it.

Growing up in the North of England, Cooke studied an art foundation course at Stockport College prior to pursuing a degree course at Nottingham Trent University. In 1997 he completed an MA at the Royal College of Art before being awarded a PhD in Fine Art from Goldsmith’s College, London (2004).

Today, Cooke’s work hangs in major collections around the world, including the Tate, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Guggenheim.

His upbringing in the North West, at a time when Manchester or ‘Madchester’ led the musical way, has had an influence on his work: “I have always liked a kind of dirty, broken quality to music and to my images. I responded to a dark, heavy melodic gloom in bands like Joy Division when I was 17, but who didn’t? I’ve left it behind a bit in newer work, but I think the spirit of post-punk helped a lot of my generation to make art. Certainly the anarchy of the Happy Mondays made me want to import a certain attitude into my images.”

In Painter’s Beach Club, visitors will be able to explore Cooke’s belief that painting is a form of travel.

“It took me forever to travel because, for so long, I was broke whilst trying to become an artist. There were no holidays between the ages of 15 and 29 but since then I have travelled a lot, and I’m drawn to the beach as a kind of frontier, the edge of the world with which we all aim to merge a couple of times a year. It’s where light, water, air, minerals and human interaction all overlap and blend, and that freedom is something I seek in painting too, and therefore it becomes the imaginative ‘elsewhere’ I set my scenes in.”

Indian Summer shows a bald, bearded man in paint-spattered board shorts standing ankle deep in water. In front of him is a still-life scene, whilst at his back is a glimpse of a naked women stepping into the water. Further in the background a woman wearing a bathing suit looks on from a doorway of a blue-painted house.

Also in the exhibition, Tree Engulfed in Waves is a disorientating, almost vibrating piece in which the outline of the tree becomes a series of lines that scrape and move across the surface of the canvas. A distorted eye – a motif of Cooke’s – sits at the centre of the painting. The blonde hair of the young female figure at the base of the painting sweeps and swirls around her to meld with the mesmerising chaos above.

“I’m interested in a multi-layered experience of landscape, where energies like wind, rain and spray come into the mix. It’s about using the paint and the materials to capture a scale of feelings around something, that could reflect inner and outer turmoil together perhaps, but not in an angsty way.”

As for his trademark ‘blue eye’, which takes centre stage in Captain’s Cabin, Cooke says: “It’s not symbolic really, but maybe it’s the painter’s eye. I’m not exactly sure because I’m more of an intuitive painter.”

Captain’s Cabin features Cooke’s other motifs, books, the word ‘crap’ and a thick-linked chain, while the interior of the cabin also contains Cooke’s distinctive, swirling sweep of paint that figures so strongly and evocatively in Tree Engulfed by Waves and Interference.

‘Buy More Crap’ is sprayed on the side of the pick-up truck in Interference and is perhaps a comment on 21st century affluenza. As Nigel explains: “I am constantly agitated by the volume of crap being produced in the world and the environmental effect of it. The pressure to buy things. But it’s also a parody of self-judgement. I like to poke fun at my endeavours in the work here and there - heroic artists washed up on a beach, books of crap, a pick-up truck loaded with sculptures.”

Speaking about the inspiration for his new work, and title of the exhibition, Cooke has said “'The Painter's Beach Club’ is a state of mind, a moveable feast, snap shots of contemporary painting. I'm interested in artist groups, colonies, and the idea that social media has made this a more flexible and interesting term - Instagram is a way of looking down a narrow aperture of what's going on, it creates a space for connection. The club is an interior place, like the spaces within my paintings, it's part of an interior landscape, a psychic space, a place of freedom.”

The title of Painter’s Beach Club also refers to a complementary exhibition Cooke is curating at Jerwood Gallery entitled Telescope. Intriguingly, Instagram has played a key role in helping him to decide which artists to include: “I was following this idea of the ocean voyage as a metaphor for the artistic journey into the unknown. The studio is like a ship and I had this funny idea that looking at Instagram - as painters do in the studio - was like using a telescope. When we procrastinate, instead of getting on with the job of actually painting, we can look into this device and get a snapshot of what our fellow painters are up to. Although it’s completely new to me, it has been quite nice to keep in touch with artists you don’t see much, find new ones and communicate with those who like your work on the other side of the world.

The telescope idea led me to choose a range of people who I have either kept in touch with, or discovered on Instagram. As artists, there are people alongside us all the time - people we teach, people who work in the studio as assistants who then become successful artists in their own right, people who disappear for a decade, have kids and take up painting again later, etc. ‘Painter’s Beach Club’ is about this - celebrating the community of painters and the mutual support that is the spirit of artistic survival.”

Jerwood Gallery Director Liz Gilmore says: “It’s a great moment to be exhibiting one of Britain’s leading contemporary painters, Nigel Cooke, whose new body of work pushes the boundaries of painting practice today. This exhibition comes hot on the heels of Nigel’s hugely successful debut in Hong Kong and it is a special opportunity for people locally and nationally to view and enjoy the work. With the beach featuring so heavily in Nigel’s latest work, the idea the beach being a destination, a frontier for discovery makes it even more appropriate that Nigel will be showing these works here, for the very first time, in Hastings.”