Barrie Cooke - Abstract Artworks

 

Barrie Cooke (1931 - 2014) is widely considered one of our leading contemporary artists. He was born in Cheshire in 1924, but lived in Ireland since 1954 until his death in 2014. Brought up in Jamaica and Bermuda, Cooke moved to the US as a teenager and studied art history and biology at Harvard University. He was a major figure in the development of painting in Ireland, an environment which he found offered him fertile ground for his lifelong love of nature, and his twin passions of painting and fishing. Cooke travelled extensively. His journeys to Lapland, Cuba, Cape Cod, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, and Madeira are viscerally depicted in his work. The formation, transformation and degradation of the environment have been constant motifs. Hugely respected by his peers for the commitment and integrity of his vision, Cooke had his first solo exhibition in Dublin in 1955 and the following year received a scholarship to study with Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg. He developed deep friendships with several poets including the late Séamus Heaney, John Montague and Ted Hughes. He represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale in 1963 and exhibited widely throughout Europe, the US and Canada. Major retrospectives include shows in the Douglas Hyde Gallery (1986), the Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (1992), and LAC, Perpignan, France (1995). His work is held by IMMA, the Ulster Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Haags Gemeentemuseum, and in many other collections worldwide.(oliversearsgallery.com)

 

Kathleen Gemberling Adkison - Abstract Artworks

Kathleen Gemberling Adkison (1917 – 2010), was an American abstract painter.
Late Northwest artist Kathleen Gemberling Adkison created expressive abstract paintings. An avid hiker and mountain climber, her dynamic compositions were influenced by the natural landscape. In her own words, "The insistent life-force or energy expressed by nature in its wondrous plenitude of form and color, its mystery, its surprise and growth cycle are what continue to compel my work." She often placed her canvases flat on the floor, and painted with broad strokes and splattered paint.
Adkison studied art at Cornish Institute in Seattle and was a student of celebrated Northwest artists Mark Tobey and Morris Graves in the 1940s. She was based in Spokane, Eastern Washington. Her work was the subject of exhibitions and museum surveys throughout her career. She was one of only eight women included in the exhibition "Northwest Art Today" for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair.

Kazuo Nakamura - Canadian Abstract Art

Kazuo Nakamura was a Japanese-Canadian painter and sculptor (1926 - 2002) and a founding member of the Toronto-based Painters Eleven group in the 1950s.  Nakamura produced abstract paintings that were distinctive among Canadian artists of his generation in part because of their formal simplicity and rigour.
"Influenced by Jock Macdonald’s interest in Hungarian painter and photographer (and teacher at the Bauhaus art school in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s) László Moholy-Nagy and his own reading in science journals, Nakamura was often concerned with science, time and space. As is evident in his “inner structure” paintings of the 1950s, Nakamura described himself as seeking a "fundamental universal pattern in all art and nature." Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, he increasingly emphasized grid paintings based on number structures, which came to involve the Pascal triangle, an array of number relationships associated with triangles studied by 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. To Nakamura, these laboriously inscribed works were a quest for some ultimate order in the apparent chaos of the universe. "(thecanadianencyclopedia.ca)

Ennio Morlotti

Ennio Morlotti ( 1910 – 1992) was an Italian painter of the Corrente de Vita movement started in Milan as a counterpoint to nationalistic Futurism and the Novecento Italiano movements. His figures show an affinity to the geometry of Cezanne and Matisse, but later works introduce elements of abstraction... Some figurative references of landscapes and still lifes were still present, but matter and colour (often laid on canvas with a spatula) became the protagonist of his works. In 1950 and 1951, he exhibited at the Caterine Viviano Gallery in New York, starting to be known outside Italy. Besides Venturi, Morlotti’s work was praised by other leading Italian critics such as Arcangeli, Longhi, Testori and Volpe. Arcangeli in particular included Morlotti among “gli ultimi naturalisti”, the last naturalist painters, as one of the last heirs of a Lombard tradition of figuration.