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.

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.

(opens in a new window) Learn more at querinistampalia.org.

Nigel Cooke: Bad Habits

by Evelyn C. Hankins

“For Venice presents very real challenges to artists. Despite the seemingly endless attention it has received, it somehow remains elusive, requiring from the greatest artists that they yield up something of themselves, instead of merely reflecting back the surface of its beauties.”
Ian Warrell, Turner and Venice [1]

Since Venice was established more than 1,500 years ago, the city has been largely defined by its location on the Adriatic Sea, a crucial throughway between Europe and Asia that enabled the Venetians to control the flow of trade and ascend to an international mercantile power backed by its mighty naval fleet. The city’s role as a geographical crossroads and economic intermediary between East and West can be traced through St. Mark’s Basilica, the Doge’s Palace, and its other iconic architectural monuments, which blend Italian Gothic and Renaissance forms with Byzantine and Islamic elements. That same uniquely advantageous position also imbued Venice with a transitional character – culturally, politically, and economically – that ebbs and flows, akin to the daily vicissitudes of Adriatic tides, and allows for ongoing reinvention, politically, personally and artistically. In fact, Venice, much like Athens and Rome, must be understood as a palimpsest, a place where the architecture, art, monuments, and even the streets visually archive discrete moments in history and cultures as they commingle, overlap, and overtake one another.

The Fondazione Querini Stampalia can likewise be regarded as a palimpsest. A private palace turned public museum housing paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, in-situ murals, and a library, it has undergone numerous architectural and operational transformations since the 16th century, when the Querinis, an influential clan who trace their history back to the founding of Venice, first undertook construction on the Campo Santa Maria Formosa. [2] In the twentieth and twentieth-centuries alone, the historical buildings were expanded and retrofitted through a pastiche of interventions by Mario Botta, Carlo Scarpa, and other architects. These designs enabled the Fondazione to expand its audience and its mission to display contemporary art alongside its historical collection, while also providing essential protection against the changing environment.

The multi-layered character and legacies of Venice and the Fondazione correlate with Cooke’s recent shift away from the paintings produced between 2019 and 2024, which are anchored by boldly colored, dynamic lines that conjure both the natural world and calligraphic text to newer works that, while still teeming with color, feature a more nuanced interplay between wispy, gossamer lines and the intensely hued fields they populate. In fact, the exhibition’s title – Bad Habits – signals Cooke’s recent reassessment of his own art practice, a mid-career scrutiny that resulted in a discernible shift in his work. Line reasserts itself in these most recent paintings, though it is not as dominant as it previously was, and it is now joined by a much broader variety of gestural marks, including meandering strokes and pointed daubs both interwoven with and sitting atop opaque and sheer washes of pigment. They are further distinguished by their darker palettes, as well as by the presence of geometric forms that anchor each canvas, hinting at a more complex spatial structure while also functioning as temporal devices. Take 2 in the AM-PM (2026), where the central glowing sphere is nestled between an inky purple, blue-black ground and a whirling tempest of lines and gestural marks that, at moments, coalesce into contours demarcating human and animal forms before dissipating among the fabric of lines. Dominating the painting’s relatively shallow space, the orb (identifiable as neither a moon or a sun, as inferred by the artwork’s title) is poised in such a way that it is not clear whether it is rising or setting; this creates the impression of both temporal suspension and chronological ambiguity, which follows Cooke’s partiality for paintings that remain elusive and open-ended, neither resolute nor clear. [3] Night Ruins (2026), whose palette skews slightly lighter and hotter with reds, oranges, and yellows, is more abstract, with fewer decipherable figurative elements emerging from the squall of brushstrokes. Indeed, the painting’s turbulent, swirling strokes practically constitute an all-over field, an inscrutable screen that is on the verge of completely engulfing the half-circle, as well as the (barely visible) sail-like form to its right. The just-larger-than-human scale of both these paintings – roughly 8 feet square – functions in tandem with their gestural mark-making and oscillating contours to produce a deeply phenomenological viewing experience that is only intensified by their simmering palettes.

Within his broader practice, Cooke tends to recast his engagement with art history with each body of paintings – and this group is no exception. Here it is J.M.W. Turner whose paintings resonate most conspicuously with Cooke’s in terms of process, style, and engagement with time. Turner made three visits to Venice between 1819 and 1840; however, it was the final, two-week visit – when he made more than 300 ink, pencil, and watercolor sketches across the city at all times of day and night – that was the critical catalyst in the development of his late painting practice. During his final decades, Turner moved away from depictions of identifiable subjects in favor of radically economical compositions built up from layers of glazes and other water media, which he applied in open, loose brushstrokes to evoke the ephemeral, intangible conditions generated by the interaction of light, atmosphere, and water. [4] Riva degli Schiavone, Venice: Water Fête (c. 1845), for example, consists almost solely of white and silvery-gray scumbled brushwork, with architectural elements in related hues barely visible on the left countered on the right by a smattering of people, whose forms are highlighted with red, yellow, and blue. While sketching always played a foundational role in Turner’s painting practice, it increasingly functioned only as a point of departure: an opportunity to consider a motif that on canvas is dispersed to become quasi-abstract with remnants of solid forms only suggested by marks, smudges, smears, or lines that often do not provide enough information to discern whether the forms are cohering or dissolving. That suspended state of fluidity, which is most prevalent in Turner’s late paintings, is what art historians have characterized as “…the state of ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’…” [5]

Cooke’s paintings conjure an analogous state of indeterminate flux, yet, in contrast to Turner’s ghostly and ethereal scenes, his are distinguished by an animated, comparably muscular, interplay between abstract gestures and organic contours, thanks to line’s sustained presence throughout the compositions’ pictorial space. Moreover, Cooke’s paintings propose a multi-layered, distinctly conceptual exploration of time. As is typical of his painting practice, Cooke sketched not from natural or built environments, but rather from art historical precedents, ranging from Antiquity and the Renaissance through to the Postwar era. An early study for Night Ruins provides a view onto the way Cooke’s paintings, no matter how abstract they may appear, are always grounded in figuration, which, while often latent or fleeting in the final canvas, is never fully expunged. In this small mixed media composition, Cooke distills Titian’s Entombment of Christ (1520) down to linear contours that impart both the compositional structure and the sculptural three-dimensionality of the 16th century work. In an acknowledgement of this exhibition’s venue, Cooke introduces, atop the draped arm of the dead Christ, the outlined form of the swaddled baby Christ at the center of Giovanni Bellini’s The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple (c. 1460–1470), a cornerstone of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia’s collection. Returning to Cooke’s painting, the vibrantly colored torrent of marks in Night Ruins hardly read as recognizable forms, yet the composition conveys, even radiates, the intense emotions and dramatic actions of Titian’s subject, while the palette echoes that of Bellini, sumptuously lit up from within. Bellini’s painting, which depicts the infant Jesus wrapped tightly in cloth, is conventionally interpreted as foreshadowing his death and subsequent entombment. While Cooke’s interest in Bellini and Titian is exclusively formal (rather than iconographic), his sketch nevertheless reinscribes this layering of time so that the composition at once spans and compresses a number of disjunctive intervals: that of Christ’s life, the arc of art history, and his own process of creation. [6] If Turner’s paintings are suspended in a state of “becoming,” then Cooke’s work must be considered in infinite oscillation extending fluidly both forward and backwards across time.

Cabin Fever (2026) and The Hour of the Monkey (2026), two vertical paintings by Cooke that share a central band of frenzied brushwork enveloped on either side by darker passages broken up by sporadic colored light, also engage in this sort of back-and-forth. They extend another compositional nod to the iconic painting by Bellini, in which the tri-part division wedges the frieze of figures between an undifferentiated, jet-black background and a trompe l’oeil marble parapet. While not considered a formal pair or diptych, the two paintings speak to two additional – and strikingly disjunctive – touchstones of his practice: the sculpture of Classical Antiquity and the paintings of Francis Bacon. In fall 2025 while visiting Athens, Cooke created colored pencil sketches of sculptural fragments, distilling the three-dimensional forms into a tangle of sinuous lines. [7] At various points on the two pages, anatomical parts – a human foot, arm and shoulder; a horse’s torso, leg and hoof; a bull raising its horned head above the fray – materialize briefly before receding back into the labyrinth of contours. Despite the relative paucity of detailed visual information, the rhythmic lines and tumbling forms suggest a frenzy, whether a battle, athletic scrum, or voracious collective feeding, which then is conveyed in the two canvases. Cabin Fever, with flesh tones filling the composition’s central band and glowing reds and oranges simmering in the lower third, puts forth a dark, almost carnal scene of morphing human and animal bodies locked in struggle, as if merging the sculptures of Antiquity with elements of Francis Bacon. While the primary action in Bacon’s paintings, such as Figure in Movement (1976), are typically bound by the artist’s signature space-frame and blocks of color, the forms in Cooke’s paintings register more chaotically due to the expanding, all-over accretion of different gestural marks and (in an unusually legible moment) the bull’s head and torso rising into the space above. The Hour of the. Monkey, by contrast, exudes a lighter, almost sylvan feeling, with verdant green, purple, ochre, and lapis blue passages accentuating the sensuous qualities of the pink-leaning flesh tones, a counterpoint that is more reminiscent of Titian or Manet than the shadowy carnality of Cabin Fever. Streaking downward through both paintings are vibrantly colored lines, which sit at the very front of the picture plane. In Cabin Fever, these filaments read as lightning bolts that further charge the already intense scene. In The Hour of the Monkey, by contrast, these forms instead contribute to the painting’s pastoral ambience with the upper blue register fluctuating between sky and water. Embedded within both compositions is a rectangular plane, which in The Hour of the Monkey reads as a mirror reflecting back a more turbulent atmosphere that we, the viewers, occupy, imbuing the otherwise bucolic scene with a restrained feeling of premonition.

Completed and displayed in the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Cooke’s paintings are inevitably pressed into conversation with Venice’s art historical heritage. At the same time, Cooke created – and we are viewing – these artworks in the present moment, when it is all but impossible to avoid the onslaught of extraordinary upheavals unfolding around us and on the global stage. As much as these paintings encourage us to lose ourselves in art and history, they also elicit an undeniable sense of unease, as if we, too, are at a crossroads. The show’s title, when transposed from the individual to the collective, takes a chilling turn: it prompts us to consider our moral responsibilities and choice of actions when faced with what increasingly reads as yet another moment of historical reckoning. Ultimately, Cooke leaves us with more questions than answers, leveraging the abiding character and history of Venice to, in his words, “evoke moments of uncertainty and darkness, with threads of hope and the possibility of change glimmering as moonlit fragments.”

1. Ian Warrell, “Turner and Venice,” in Turner and Venice (London: Tate Publishing, 2003), 28-29.
2. For a history of the family, building, and art collection, see (opens in a new window) https://www.querinistampalia.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/ENG_narrativo_QUERINI.pdf.
3. Cooke has often spoke of his preference for open-endedness. See, for example, the June 2023 interview with Izzy Einstein: (opens in a new window) https://officemagazine.net/vouching-uncertainty
4. Warrell, “Turner and Venice,” 24.
5. Lindsy Stainton, Turner’s Venice (New York: George Brazillier, 1985), 28, as cited in Warrell, “Turner and Venice,” 28.
6. Nigel Cooke, email message to author, March 10, 2026. This analysis is indebted to Marcelle Polednik’s astute consideration of the many ways that Cooke’s paintings engage time. Marcelle Polednik, “Painting with Time: Nigel Cooke and Classical Abstraction,” in Nigel Cooke: Paintings 2019-2025 (New York: Pace Publishing, 2026), 7-16.
7. Athens was also the impetus for an additional foundational element for the paintings in Bad Habits, specifically the Greek word (thraûsma), which translates as ruin, trauma, or fragment. Cooke often incorporated graffiti in his urban scene paintings, where if functioned both pictorially and linguistically. For the Venice works, he painted θραῦσμα on the canvas early in the compositional process. While the word is not legible, the graphic qualities of the Greek letters offer another form and layer of mark-making interwoven into the completed paintings.