Johnnie Cooper

About

Displayed across two galleries, the show is comprised of more than 50 paintings and sculptures, including works from the 1970s – a time when Cooper appeared alongside Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth with his own solo exhibition to mark the Wakefield Silver Jubilee Festival – and culminates with his most recent atmospheric large-scale oil and acrylic paintings that display broad gestural brush strokes and reflect his love for the natural landscape.

Cooper describes his approach to painting as three dimensional; accordingly, this exhibition begins with a collection of his early sculptural works. Chained to the Nest (1974), which depicts a newly-hatched bird struggling to extricate itself from a womb or nest, illustrates his attraction to, in his own words, ‘the physicality of the surface’, a quality evident in all his paintings.

Since the late 1980s, Cooper has tirelessly investigated the formal limits of painting, experimenting in many genres at his rural Worcestershire studio. throe on throe tracks this progression with examples primarily drawn from five bodies of work: Longdon Marsh (1996 - 2006), A Long Series Of Events (2014), Continuums (2011 - 2016), The Levant Series (2018 - 2019) - up to the present day, with a suite of spectacular paintings entitled The Listener Series realised between 2018 – 2019, works that display broad gestural brush strokes and reflect his love for the natural landscape.