SEOUL.- Pace is presenting Sea Mirror, an exhibition of new work by Nigel Cooke, at its gallery in Seoul. On view from April 11 to May 17, this show spans the gallery’s second and third floors, bringing 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.
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With Sea Mirror—the artist’s second solo exhibition Seoul—Cooke continues his explorations of memory, myth, and the passage of time through his distinctive visual vocabulary of gesture and touch. The exhibition will be 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.
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—which is the subject of his upcoming presentation in Seoul—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, will complement 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, 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.
Films
Moving through Nature and Meaning with Nigel Cooke
In this film, painter Nigel Cooke speaks about the new body of work he is presenting in "Sea Mirror" at the Seoul gallery from April 11 to May 17. This footage of Cooke painting in his studio and on the beaches of the Spanish island Formentera is accompanied by insights from the artist on his inspirations and his pursuit of the unexpected. "I like to let painting move between the grisly aspects of nature through to the sublime ones—the more difficult to describe ones," Cooke says. "Being away from the studio gives you more pronounced examples of that."
Nigel Cooke 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 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.
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 colour 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. Much of the work’s rehearsals and revisions are visible in the final image, which play fine, schematic areas against 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 gained a PhD in Philosophy, writing about non-linear systems in the thought of George Bataille, Michel Serres and 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.
His paintings are held in several of the world’s major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Astrup Fearnely Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo; Milwaukee Art Museum.
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