Pace Prints is pleased to announce an exhibition of new monoprints by Nigel Cooke. The exhibition will be on view from October 10 – November 8, 2025, at 536 West 22nd Street. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, October 9 from 6-8pm. This will be Cooke’s second solo exhibition at Pace Prints.
Coming five years after his debut with the gallery, Cooke’s new body of monoprints continues on a trajectory that began during his first engagement with the medium. At that time, Cooke sought to use the printshop as a means to break apart the figurative image, often starting with existing compositions from older paintings then utilizing the natural layering and erasing that occurs while monoprinting to arrive at something new. This impulse to gain distance from figuration through dismantling, born out of his time in the printshop, has subsequently entered into Cooke’s broader practice, resulting in a new, now completely abstract, visual language.
Fully free from the figure, the work in this exhibition seeks to evolve the artist’s abstract vocabulary, looking at what repeats and remains, while reveling in what arrives in the image unregulated from the unconscious. The work focuses on the qualities of atmosphere, presence, and absence that the materials and printing process naturally suggest.
When producing monoprints, Cooke paints directly onto a metal plate that is then run through the press, moving quickly and producing a large volume of impressions. This iterative approach allows him to engage multiple ideas in quick succession and make decisions about what marks should and should not be kept. As the artist describes it, “It’s about not analyzing too much, more about escaping oneself and staying instinctive. This is how I find the most value in the printshop, by working with a lot of energy and across multiple works at once.” This speed and energy materialize in staccato brushstrokes that frequently coalesce into a flurry of color and movement that reveal and obscure the individual lines — building each image’s overarching structure.
The panoramic orientations of this body of prints stem from a recent period during which Cooke lived in Iceland. In attempts to render a nearby waterfall’s natural force, his paintings and drawings became wider in composition with more fractured mark-making. He eventually took to working without looking up at the scene at all, creating images of a generalized living mass with unconscious energy inspired by it.
This intuitive approach informs the kinetic rhythms and painterly vignettes captured across the works. In Ark Ashore, atmospheric marks emanate from the center of the composition, while the deeply saturated colors of Dog Thoughts or Icelandic Poem speak to the directness of the artist’s brush. Conversely, works like Northern Poem masterfully employ ghost printing to achieve subtler more ethereal effects. Negative space functions as a counterpoint to the artist’s mark making, allowing rich contrasts that guide the viewer through waves of color.
Please contact us at info@paceprints.com to inquire or request any additional information.
