Closed
7.10 – 16.11 2019
Eileen Cooper:Personal Space
3–5 Swallow St
Eileen Cooper:Personal Space
07.10 – 16.11.2019
Closed
Hours
Monday to Saturday
10:00 am – 5:30 pm
Gallery
3–5 Swallow St
London
W1B 4DE
Sisters, 2019. Eileen Cooper
Installation View . Eileen Cooper | Personal Space
Huxley-Parlour Gallery were pleased to exhibit a group of 15 new paintings by Eileen Cooper RA. The works included fuse objective drawing from life, a new part of her practice, with the instantly recognisable, passionate and imaginative works for which she is best-known.
Installation View . Eileen Cooper | Personal Space
Entitled Personal Space, the focus of the exhibition is on the female figure in nurturing and intimate spaces, explored with confidence, sensitivity and awareness. Through these images, Cooper revisits and expands on themes that she has explored throughout her forty-year career, those of universal female experience, primarily fertility, sexuality and motherhood. In this latest body of work, Cooper has also incorporated images celebrating friendship, sisterhood and sense of self. Many of the images show female figures in private spaces, engaged in intimate and sometimes simple acts, including brushing or washing hair or applying makeup. Cooper’s protagonists are confident, gazing stridently out at the viewer or at their own figures in the many mirrors that populate this body of work.
Although not strictly representational, this latest body of work comes after an intensive year of drawing from life, a marked change in the artist’s process, after a lifetime of working directly from imagination. Cooper has skilfully blended this new part of her practise with her characteristic use of graphic, decisive line, flattened space and bold colour palette.The resulting imagery explores the powerful tension created between the universal and the particular, and of the real and the imagined.
THE EXHIBITION
6
The Works
9
Eileen Cooper
Take Five
2019
Oil on canvas
Eileen Cooper
Ritual
2019
Oil on canvas
Eileen Cooper
Personal Space
2019
Oil on canvas
Eileen Cooper
Every Mother’s Son
2019
Oil on canvas
Eileen Cooper
Secret Garden
2019
Oil on canvas
Eileen Cooper
Ruby Red
2019
Oil on canvas
Eileen Cooper
Child
2019
Oil on canvas
Eileen Cooper
Sisters
2019
Oil on canvas
Eileen Cooper
Learning to Read
2019
Oil on canvas
Although not strictly representational, this latest body of work comes after an intensive year of drawing from life, a marked change in the artist’s process, after a lifetime of working directly from imagination. Cooper has skilfully blended this new part of her practise with her characteristic use of graphic, decisive line, flattened space and bold colour palette.The resulting imagery explores the powerful tension created between the universal and the particular, and of the real and the imagined.
B. United Kingdom 1953
Biography
Eileen Cooper makes figurative paintings that encompass themes of fertility, sexuality, motherhood, life and death. Cooper produces work from an unapologetically female perspective, often containing a strong autobiographical element. Her vision encompasses a wide emotional range, with an allegorical approach. As well as the female figure, animals and objects enter Cooper’s compositions, often playing symbolic or totemic roles. Her motif-filled imagery has often been described as magical realism, although she has cited Indian, Persian and Egyptian art as influences on her paintings. Her rich and sometimes expressionistic use of colour, as well as her use of strong and simplified line has been likened to the works of Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin, as well as to Expressionists Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
Cooper studied at Goldsmiths School of Art from 1971 until 1974, before completing an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art in 1977. She rose to prominence as an artist in the 1980s, during which time she also held teaching posts at both St Martins School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. She became a Royal Academician in 2001 and served as Keeper of the Royal Academy between 2010 and 2017.
Cooper has been the subject of numerous publications, including Eileen Cooper: A Woman’s Skin by Meredith M Hale and Philip Lindley, and Eileen Cooper: Between the Lines by Martin Gayford. She has had numerous international exhibitions, including solo exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts and Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. Cooper curated and co-ordinated the Royal Academy of Arts’ 249th annual Summer Exhibition in 2017. Her work is held in several important collections including The Arts Council Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum and The British Museum, London. In 2016, Cooper was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her services to Art and Art Education. She is an Honorary Fellow at Murray Edwards College at the University of Cambridge, and the Royal College of Art; and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Southampton Solent University in 2014.
She lives and works in London.