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English

Nigel Cooke
* 1973 in Manchester (GB), lives and works in London (GB)


Part III: Talking Pictures

Works in the Exhibition | Interview



Nigel Cooke: Cryptoveldt, 2003
Photo: courtesy Goetz Collection
Wilfried Petzi, Munich


Works in the Exhibition

Thinking, 2004/2005, Oil on canvas
Silva Diablo, 2005, Oil on canvas
Cryptoveldt, 2003, Hand-colored hard-ground etching on paper




Interview

Stephan Goetz: For me, there's an interesting question about all of your imagery, namely the question of reference. None of your paintings is abstract; they make reference to specific things, some of which you change so that they are not exact objects any more. So the question is what role these references to the exact world play in what you do, or what the role of specific things is in a painting of yours. Some of your landscapes I don't know, I cannot know because they are sometimes bizarre or kind of abstract. But what is the role, for example, of a pair of glasses or a fruit or something, or even the heads?
Nigel Cooke: In a way I think this group of works position that as the main point. Paintings like Thinking, 2004/2005, the one with the big brain, have a lot to do with mundane things in the general environment of the studio and of the world at large. Some of these things in Thinking are almost paraphernalia from inside this studio: books here and there, strange stuff, animal skulls but also things that I've always had around, such as collections of natural history objects, skulls, teeth, insects in cases, lightbulbs dangling from string, as in a Philip Guston studio. There's a bottle of wine on its side, there's a huge book with blank pages, there's a bowl of fruit that's just rotting through - in some ways it looks like a typical studio shot. I wear glasses to paint and one of the pairs is broken, so that's gone in because it captures the feeling of this kind of intense intimate working process - and the cracked glass is also tinted with a kind of melodramatic pain. The painting has that feeling of the intimacy of the kind of objects around me when I'm creating the work. So I always feel that this painting is a studio, but the studio is around the landscape rather than the other way round. You know what I mean, like it's in reverse: the landscape is the smaller thing, the studio the bigger thing.

Text excerpt »An alternate author-voice in the picture« - A Conversation with Nigel Cooke, London, April 2005 (Authors: Ingvild and Stephan Goetz), Exhibition Catalogue Imagination Becomes Reality Part III_Talking Pictures