Nigel Cooke

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Nigel Cooke’s paintings construct a dark and melancholic world; a deeply psychologised landscape filled with an atmosphere that articulates the trauma of creative dereliction. At its core, Cooke’s work is an allegorical conception of creativity and production, played out in a world populated by artists and philosophers. This is a place haunted by vagrant and degenerate martyrs who have caved-in to a parody of existentialism and committed themselves to experience over abstractions of thought. These characters abandon reason, wilfully and foolishly throwing themselves headlong into the unseen and unknown.