Nigel Cooke: Bad Habits

Fondazione Querini Stampalia presents “Nigel Cooke: Bad Habits”, curated by Evelyn C. Hankins, with the support of Pace Gallery. The exhibition, the artist’s first solo presentation in Italy, is developed in connection with a residency at the Fondazione and brings together a group of large-scale paintings conceived in dialogue with the palazzo’s historic and cultural context and with the city of Venice.

The new works emerge from Cooke’s engagement with layered histories, drawing in part on studies made in Athens of broken statues and ancient ruins. The Greek word thraûsma, meaning ruin, trauma or fragment, informs the early compositional stages of the paintings, where text and image intersect with recent forms of mark-making. Venice also enters the work through its stratified past, its role as a site of cultural exchange, and the artist’s response to current world events. These elements are reflected in a dark palette from which fragments of figures, objects and animals emerge.

Since the late 1990s, Cooke has developed a distinctive approach to figurative painting, more recently moving towards a more condensed visual language. Informed by fields including palaeontology, neuroscience, classical mythology and zoology, the paintings combine organic abstraction with associations of circuitry, bodies and landscape formations, exploring relations between mind and body, human and natural worlds.