The Francis McCray Gallery of Contemporary Art is pleased to present a solo survey exhibition of paintings by Michael Cook titled “Michael Cook: The Notion of Landscape” featuring his work from 1981-2009.
An opening reception featuring the artist and his work will take place Friday, September 12 from 4:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. at McCray Gallery.
Cook’s art making practice broadly explores the understanding of landscape and visual perception in a variety of media and from diverse perspectives.Throughout his work, Cook has conflated painting pictorial conventions and practice to question their distance from authentic experience. This work and other projects have explored the definition of landscape.
Expanding the understanding of ” landscape” beyond the literal image of geography has been at the core of his concerns by employing a method of visual semiotics. As Kathleen Stewart Howe wrote in her essay on the exhibition Veneer, “What are the conditions under which objects become visible in culture? What is the personal and human significance of those visual manifestations? These are questions Cook has pursued in his paintings since the bubble chamber paintings of the late 1970’s.”
Cook has had more than 20 individual exhibitions and his work has been included in numerous group shows in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cambridge and New York. His artwork has been extensively reviewed and included in many publications, private collections and the permanent collections of The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and The Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, among others. Cook is a respected educator and lecturer and has held faculty positions at University of Illinois, University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco Art institute. Currently, Cook is a Professor of Art at the University of New Mexico.
The exhibition runs from September 12 through October 17. For more information, contact the McCray Gallery at 575.538.6517.