NEW YORK, NY.- Stephen Haller Gallery announced the Pollock-Krasner Foundation has awarded artist Kate O’Donovan Cook a major grant. This generous funding will enable the artist to continue to create new work in her distinctly painterly photographic vision.
The Pollock Krasner Foundation has been an important source of support to individual visual artists of recognized merit since 1985 thanks to the generous bequest of leading Abstract Expressionist artist Lee Krasner, widow of artist Jackson Pollock. The Foundation is the successor to the estates of both artists and was formed with the sole purpose of providing financial assistance to individual artists.
Born in San Francisco, Kate O'Donovan Cook came to New York in 1997 to attend Sarah Lawrence College with a concentration in studio arts, primarily painting. She later switched to Fine Art Photography due to an allergic response to chemicals in paint. Determined, she continued to express her distinct artistic vision in her new medium. O’Donovan Cook received her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2010.
O’Donovan Cook’s painterly narrative photography reveals her artistic lineage. She is the daughter of the late painter Gordon Cook – his studio was her playroom. She is the granddaughter of Irish writer Frank O’Connor and actress Evelyn Bowen. O'Donovan Cook's technique often includes photographing herself as multiple people in a single image to frame a narrative. Her work is characterized by explorations of identity through role playing in ways both theatrical and fantastical.
Profoundly interested in issues of identity, Cook has continued her studies at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and sees a seamless relationship between her artistic work and her studies of the human psyche.
Kate O’Donovan Cook is on the cusp of international renown. Museum curators often prize her work as a bridge conflating the history of art with a contemporary vision and techniques. Her work was exhibited in Contemporary Artists vs The Masters at the Brattleboro Museum because of her unique vision and references to great painters in her work.
Kate O'Donovan Cook's work has been exhibited alongside Shirin Neshat and Gregory Crewdson at Cornell’s Herbert F Johnson Museum, chosen as a Director's Favorites at the New Britain Museum of American Art which then followed up with her highly successful solo exhibition New/Now, which followed her solo at the Mattatuck Museum. Her work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art/Corcoran.
The art world press has responded enthusiastically to the work of this talented artist. Susan Rand Brown beautifully profiled Cook and her NBMAA solo exhibition in Art New England. When Cook’s work was exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in DC alongside famed Fine Art photographers the Washington press singled out Cook's work for praise.
The art world is grateful to the Pollock-Krasner Foundation for its continuing support of outstanding artists such as Kate O’Donovan Cook.
