NIGEL COOKE

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.Read More About This Exhibition