Eileen Cooper at 50
A celebration

Exhibition
7-29 October 2003

#608, 526 West 26th Street, New York 10001, NY
t 001 212 620 7550

Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 6pm

Contact
Clare Cooper info@artfirstnyc.com
Kate McCrickard davidkrutfa@earthlink.net

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With three decades of painting behind her, Eileen Cooper's powerful new work explores the changes that have fed into her evolving imaginative narrative. Her highly personal style, always steeped in a distinctive expressionism, reflects stages in her own life that readily associate with archetypal themes and mythologies. This exhibition is driven by drawing, alongside a new group of small paintings on panel primed with gesso. A True Likeness is typical of a new range of delicate hues which widen the emotional resonance of these images. Andrew Lambirth, author of the catalogue essay which accompanies this exhibition, writes of the studio drawings that:

'The overt subject is self-proclaiming: a playful examination of what the activity of being an artist is all about. The tiger and the acrobat stand for imagination. Of the tiger, Cooper comments: "I love the idea that the studio is the kind of place you might get a tiger walking through. Here is the unfettered primacy of the imagination...

'Traditionally it's the model who is naked in the studio, but Cooper has reversed this, and depicts the artist unclothed, brush in hand. But at the same time she has dispensed with the model and focuses on herself, at once the artist and model....The figures are set in illusionistic space articulated by closely observed still-life elements. "I've always been obsessed by the rectangle and squashing things into it. These pictures are to do with that also - rectangular doors and windows and paintings within the work.

'The room is a nursery as well as a studio, for the activities done therein are, after all, similar - both to do with nurturing: motherhood and the making of art. Cooper's work has always been very closely autobiographical, for it has been her particular skill to make public statements out of private experiences.'

Recently elected Royal Academician, Cooper is enjoying a renewed commitment to drawing and through the use of new imagery and the charged palette of her paintings, reveals an artist who embraces change and innovation, but is sustained by the core of a beautifully evolved formal language. Eileen Cooper trained at Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art (where she is currently a visiting lecturer) and her work is in many public collections including the Arts Council of Great Britain, the British Council, The British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, major city art galleries throughout the UK, and many private collections in the UK and the USA.