Ethan Cook
Born 1983
Lives and works in New York, USA
Ethan Cook, an artist based in New York, explores materialism and minimalism in his artwork, employing two primary mediums: woven canvas and handmade paper. Rather than adhering to the conventional approach of applying pigment to canvas through brushes, knives, or hands, Cook opts for a unique method. He weaves colored fabric panels on a four-harness loom, stitches them together, and stretches them onto bars to create his paintings.
In Cook's artistic process, the act of creating art becomes a harmonious blend of meditation and rhythmic motion. The immense loom, with its countless moving components and intricate processes, generates a symphony of actions that are both swift and unpredictable. These actions give rise to various idiosyncrasies, such as pulled threads or skipped knots, resulting in a diverse array of textures that unmistakably showcase the handmade nature of the works.
Biography
Ethan Cook was born in 1983 in Tyler, Texas, and lives and works in New York. He makes paintings without paint. Cook weaves panels of coloured fabric by hand on a four-harness loom, stitches them together and stretches them on bars, and the pulled threads and skipped knots of the weaving stay visible in the finished surface. He also works with handmade paper.
Cook has had solo exhibitions at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles, Marfa and Brussels, Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles, Half Gallery in New York, T293 in Rome, Loyal Gallery in Stockholm, Gana Art in Seoul and Patrick De Brock in Knokke, among others. In 2014 his work was in a group exhibition that T293 presented at Sadie Coles HQ, London, and in The Go-Between at the National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples. In 2022 he was resident at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut. His work is in public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Voorlinden, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and the Juan Carlos Maldonado Art Collection. Anat Ebgi published a monograph on his work in 2018, and he has been written about in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times T Magazine and the Brooklyn Rail.
At Bartha Contemporary, Cook showed in ANOTHER with Henrik Eiben and Beat Zoderer (8 to 24 June 2023), a group exhibition in which every work used textiles. He showed three hand-woven works in cotton and linen, all made in 2023. One of them, How Big Is The Ocean, was then included in December Edit at the gallery (1 December 2023 to 8 January 2024).
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