Nigel Cooke

Sea Mirror

On View
Apr 11 – May 17, 2025
Seoul

Pace is pleased to present 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 will span 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.

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 our 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."

The Bees of the Invisible by Nigel Cooke

The Wild Bird-Hearts that Love Her by Nigel Cooke

Nigel Cooke,
Sea Mirror 3,
2024

2024, gouache on paper, 17 cm × 26 cm (6-11/16" × 10-1/4") 27.2 cm × 36.3 cm (10-11/16" × 14-5/16"), framed

About the Artist

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.

Learn More

EXHIBITION DETAILS

Nigel Cooke
Sea Mirror
Apr 11 – May 17, 2025

GALLERY

267 Itaewon-ro
Yongsan-gu
Seoul

PRESS

Press Release

CONNECT

(opens in a new window) @nigelcookestudio
(opens in a new window) @pacegallery

Journal

View All

Nigel Cooke

Sea Mirror

Films

Moving through Nature and Meaning with Nigel Cooke

Checklist

About the Artist

EXHIBITION DETAILS

GALLERY

PRESS

CONNECT

Journal

Nigel Cooke: Paintings 2019-2025

Moving through Nature and Meaning with Nigel Cooke

A Conversation Between Nigel Cooke, Robert Macfarlane and Max Porter

‘The Complexity of Life Is Inspiration’: Nigel Cooke on Painting, Mystery, and Myth