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114 BARRIE COOKE HRHA (B.1931) Nude (1985)Oil on panel, 19 x 20cm (7½ x 7¾’’)
Signed, inscribed with title (19)’85 verso
Provenance: From the Collection of the late Gillian Bowler.
Exhibited: ‘Barrie Cooke’, Hendriks Gallery,
under title ‘Study for Nude and White (1),
where purchased by Gillian Bowler, April 1986’.
€ 1,000 - 2,000
115 BARRIE COOKE HRHA (1931-2014) Tekapo Lake Painting I (1989)Oil on canvas, 173 x 173cm (68 x 68’’)
Signed and inscribed verso
Provenance: From the Collection of the late Gillian Bowler.
Exhibited: ‘
Barrie Cooke: A Retrospective’
, Royal Hibernian Academy, September/October 2003, and travelling to The Model
Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo, November 2003.
Literature: “
Barrie Cooke”
Gandon Editions 1998, illustrated pg 28;
“
Barrie Cooke a Retrospective
”, by Aidan Dunne 2003, mentioned on pg 21.
Born in Cheshire, England, Barrie Cooke came to Ireland in 1954 and immediately fell in love with the landscape. He was
interested in the immediate and compelling accurate accounts of the natural world, depicting how close in nature life is to
death. Death, change and decay are built into the natural world, and it is for this reason that we see a great deal of death in
his oil paintings: crumpled bodies of game animals, diseased sheep and their remains and carcasses. It seems as if Cooke is
always immersed in nature, at his best in a wet, measy rural place, removed from the experience of our world.
Cooke started visiting New Zealand from the mid/late 1980s, making regular fishing trips and he loved the vast open spaces
of the East Coast with its unspoilt environment, which contrasted to that of the polluted waters of the inland lakes and rivers
of Ireland which occupied his mind and his brush during this period. Aidan Dunne wrote in Cooke’s retrospective catalogue
about this painting: “If the death of a lake in Ireland is a death of possibility,
Tekapo Lake Painting I
is a startling evocation of
the pristine lake as a space of pure possibility. We can refer directly back to
Trench Lake,
which works in a similar way, and
contrast the sheer brilliance of the light and the feeling of spaciousness.”
We would like to thank Aidan dunne whose writings on the artist form the basis of this catalogue entry
€ 5,000 - 8,000
The Gi l l i an Bowl er Co l l ec t i on