Nigel Cooke

Pace Gallery is delighted to present its second solo exhibition in New York, and fourth globally, of works by Nigel Cooke. Completed over the past year, these ten new large-scale paintings mark a significant shift in the artist’s direction toward a more performative, energetic, and abstract approach to figuration. This shift was propelled by a recent residency in the city, where Cooke remarked that “the entire philosophy of what it is I am doing has been adjusted.” These works, which reference actions, places, and people, exist as matrices in which the artist’s free and open process meets wider themes of metaphor, spirit, nature, representation, and the living material quality of paint. In this way, these new works draw on the legacies of American artists such as Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Still as well as Abstract Expressionism, British Figuration, Spanish painting, and Chinese silk painting. The exhibition will be on view from January 31 through February 29, 2020 on the first-floor gallery.

Over his twenty-year career, Cooke has used ambiguity and fragmentation as strategies in his painting, collapsing the distinction between genres such as abstraction, figuration, landscape, and still life. The exhibition at 540 West 25th Street highlights Cooke’s new methodologies which move away from narrative motifs and toward energetic systems that have their own nature and inner logic.