Mark Cooper
From intimate ceramic vessels to large-scale, site-specific installations, Mark Cooper’s work transcends medium, design, and authorship. He has created ceramics, bronzes, paintings, and sculptures as collaborative creative exchange with artists in Vietnam, China, Korea, and Seattle. The work reflects the artist’s sustained interest in cultural diversity, visual language, visual literacy and how we understand meaning within our own closed systems of expectations. Cooper’s art, however, does not confine its “about-ness” to art alone. He combines a self-reflexivity with an address to the world; extracting and responding to stimulation both external and internal. His collages are made with fiberglass pieces and layered with rice paper, paint, silk-screens, and varying images and patterns to explore dualities of culture and meaning. His ceramic vessels may sit precariously above stacks of paintings serving as pedestals or upon tree-like hand cut plywood pedstals. The pedestals themselves offer apt commentary on sculptural form, practice and presentation from ancient Japan to Brancusi, Mel Kendrick to Jessica Stockholder.
Cooper is best-known for his large public art pieces, made in collaboration with children, hospital patients, students, and other constituencies, for such institutions as The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston College Museum, Capital Children's Museum in Washington DC, DeCordova …
From intimate ceramic vessels to large-scale, site-specific installations, Mark Cooper’s work transcends medium, design, and authorship. He has created ceramics, bronzes, paintings, and sculptures as collaborative creative exchange with artists in Vietnam, China, Korea, and Seattle. The work reflects the artist’s sustained interest in cultural diversity, visual language, visual literacy and how we understand meaning within our own closed systems of expectations. Cooper’s art, however, does not confine its “about-ness” to art alone. He combines a self-reflexivity with an address to the world; extracting and responding to stimulation both external and internal. His collages are made with fiberglass pieces and layered with rice paper, paint, silk-screens, and varying images and patterns to explore dualities of culture and meaning. His ceramic vessels may sit precariously above stacks of paintings serving as pedestals or upon tree-like hand cut plywood pedstals. The pedestals themselves offer apt commentary on sculptural form, practice and presentation from ancient Japan to Brancusi, Mel Kendrick to Jessica Stockholder.
Cooper is best-known for his large public art pieces, made in collaboration with children, hospital patients, students, and other constituencies, for such institutions as The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston College Museum, Capital Children's Museum in Washington DC, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Grounds, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Nationally his work has been included in group exhibitions at Boston’s Museum of Fine Art and MassArt. Internationally, his work has been shown at the Westlicht Collection in Vienna, the Kunstmuseum in Germany, and Musee de l’Elysee in Switzerland.
Courtesy of Samsøn
