Nigel Cooke

This spring, Cooke will be the Fondazione Querini Stampalia’s first-ever artist in residence. During his stay in Venice, he will focus on a series of large-scale, atmospheric paintings that draw inspiration from the palazzo’s historic and cultural heritage, as well as the living fabric of the city. The residency, proposed by the museum, has been conceived as a period of immersion in Venice and its storied lagoon, canals, and singular conditions of light.

One of Venice’s oldest and most prestigious institutions, the Fondazione Querini Stampalia will host Cooke in its Portego della Biblioteca, now transformed into an artist studio. Adjacent to the museum’s historic library and directly above the Carlo Scarpa-designed ground floor rooms, the space overlooks the waters of the Rio di Santa Maria Formosa. Following the residency, five paintings will be exhibited in the same place they were completed, drawing a continuous line from artist to viewer.

Cooke’s practice is often guided by his experiences in different parts of the world and other autobiographical material. The new paintings find their origins in a trip the artist made to Athens, where, while making studies of broken statues in museums, he meditated on the city’s ancient ruins. Over the millennia, Athens has become a living palimpsest, revealing thousands of years of collective and individual experience upon its surfaces. The Greek word θραῦσμα, thraûsma—meaning ruin, trauma, or fragment—became a foundational idea for Cooke’s new work. Elements of this word appear in the paintings’ early compositional stages, functioning as both text and image and creating a tension with other kinds of mark-making he has recently explored.

Venice’s complex, layered history and its role as a global crossroads have also informed Cooke’s thinking. Like the Greek capital, the city has long been a repository for the remnants of past civilizations, an inheritance that has nurtured its rich tradition of scientific and cultural thought. The artist also draws on the darker side of Venice’s past, as well as his impressions of current world events. These are reflected in the paintings’ deep, nocturnal palette, from which fragments of figures, objects, and animals emerge. In Cooke’s words, the new works “evoke moments of uncertainty and darkness, with threads of hope and the possibility of change glimmering as moonlit fragments.”

Deeply engaged with the history of painting, Cooke holds a significant place in the development of contemporary British painting. He joins a lineage of artists who have found creative inspiration in Venice. For Cooke, the new paintings—like the city itself—have become a site in which the self can be reimagined. Through his abstracted marks, they trace repeating patterns in which past and present, personal and collective, circle and reflect upon one another, suspended in a state of wavering uncertainty.