DAVE COOPER
WORK:
Bosco Cooper, 2018.
Bosco Cooper, 2018.
TECHNICAL DETAILS:
Oil on canvas, 134 x 400 cm
Description: A humorous orgy of bulbous forms and oddball characters, Bosco Cooper features many of the visual motifs which have come to characterise the work of Dave Cooper (Nova Scotia, Canada, 1967). Wide-eyed cartoon folk, curvaceous women, wolves and toothy hybrids inhabit a compendium of risqué scenes in which Adam, Eve, God and the Devil are all reimagined.
In contrast to Bosch’s focus on the dangers of lust, this version of The Garden of Earthly Delights is a celebratory image, a woodland carnival where nothing is off-limits. Expressed in a rich palette of spring pastels and sombre, autumnal tones, Cooper’s large-scale oil painting casts the viewer as a potential participant, observing the action through a spongy mass of undergrowth and naked flesh.
Biography: Dave Cooper (Nova Scotia, Canada, 1967) has created award-winning comics, children’s television shows and short films, while at the same time developing a career as an oil painter. His visual universe stretches from cute to weirdly distasteful, and his works often feature offbeat characters in awkward or erotic situations. The common denominator, as the artist explains, is “an element of extreme contrast, whether it’s cute and horrifying, innocent and lurid, grungy and delicate, light and dark.”
Cooper has received numerous awards across the different media he explores. His periodical, Weasel, won both the underground Ignatz Award and the mainstream Harvey Award in 2000, while his short film, The Absence of Eddy Table (2016) has received prizes at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema and the Amanda Awards, Norway. A major retrospective of Cooper’s comic art was held in Paris in 2002 and his oil paintings have been shown in New York and Los Angeles.
︎ @davecooper67
︎︎︎ Website
︎NAVE 16.MATADERO ︎︎︎07 OCT—27 FEB
