Man’s soul is, in a certain way, entities.
-Aristotle
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Entities, an exhibition by New York-based artist Ethan Cook. In Entities, Cook develops the rigorously structured approach to artmaking that has come to define his paintings, sculptures, and works of paper over the last decade. The works feature new materials and surface qualities while experimenting with logics of geometric proportion and color. The artist’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, Entities will be on view in Brussels from May 26 – July 20, 2023.
The exhibition’s greater emphasis on varied brushwork and surface texture points to a new direction in Cook’s work. Paintings such as Hello Newman, 2023 feature painted segments marked by evident, repetitious brushwork. Other paintings such as And the Color Red, 2023 incorporate, for the first time, copper panels. For years, Cook has produced his hand-woven paintings on a four-harness loom, foregoing traditional oil or acrylic paints for textile. Here, the laborious and handmade feel of the woven sections come into contrast with the industrial sleekness of copper and aluminum. Given the reflective qualities of copper and aluminum, the works transform depending on lighting and environmental conditions, introducing a sense of chance within Cook’s otherwise precise command over color.
In two works, Small Red Flower, 2022 and Small Pink Flower, 2022, Cook abandons the rectangular constraint in favor of more organic, fluctuating forms. Each dichromatic shaped canvases resembles a flower, with their radial arrangement of petal-like semi-circles emanating from an aluminum center painted with acrylic. Cook initially conceived the work as an experiment with the form in The Blue Acrobat, 1929 by Pablo Picasso. Further abstracting the moving figure’s curved limbs and head, the artist began dialoguing with the rich history of shaped canvases from László Peri to Ellsworth Kelly, Elizabeth Murray, and Frank Stella.
Cook also incorporates copper and aluminum panels within his grid-like works on handmade paper. To produce the works, Cook first mixes raw pigment with abaca, cotton, and water; afterward, he presses and dries the mixture. Like his canvas works, the works of paper emphasize the experiential effects of color and form, process, and chance. The solidity of metal juxtaposed with the mutability of paper imbues the works with a sense of imperfection and impermanence.
For Entities, Cook turned special attention to representations of geometry and their effects on viewers. Like Barnett Newman’s “zips,” the artist employs compositional devices such as long vertical lines or repeating rectangles to distill the essential qualities of each composition. Cook’s abiding interest in phenomenology—in how our conception of the external world is shaped through our bodily engagements with it—adjoins an invigorated attention to geometry in the exhibition. “Geometry is a way of processing all of the chaotic, abstract data of the world and organizing it,” Cook explains, “thereby allowing us to understand how we are a part of or a function of that data. It both describes and shapes our bodily immersion within and experience of the world.”
Ethan Cook (b. 1983, Texas; lives and works in New York, NY) has had solo shows at Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles and Marfa; Half Gallery, New York; Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen; Galerie Philipp Zollinger, Zurich; T293, Rome; Loyal Gallery, Stockholm; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles; Noire Chapel, Torino; Bill Brady, Miami; Sunday-S Gallery, Copenhagen; American Contemporary, New York; Galerie Jeanroch Dard, Paris; Rod Barton, London; Patrick de Brock Gallery, Knokke; and Gana Art Hannam, Seoul. His work has been covered in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Brooklyn Rail, Interview Magazine, Architectural Digest, among other publications.