Nigel Cooke Brings Venice's "Night Ruins" to Pace Tokyo in First Japan Solo Show
- 8 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Pace opens Night Ruins, a solo exhibition of new paintings by British artist Nigel Cooke, at its Tokyo gallery in Azabudai Hills on August 28, running through October 10. It is Cooke's first solo presentation in the city, bringing to Japan a body of small, atmospheric works made this spring during his residency at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice — the foundation’s first-ever artist residency.
The paintings center on a recurring motif: a stone dais or platform set against a lagoon horizon, where fragments of animals and figures dissolve into tangled, overlapping forms. The compositions relate closely to one another, with motifs repeating and shifting from canvas to canvas, uniform in scale — small windows onto a single, unfolding process.
The Tokyo show runs alongside Bad Habits, Cooke's ongoing exhibition tied to the 61st Venice Biennale and curated by Evelyn C. Hankins, which presents related paintings inside the Querini Stampalia palazzo itself. Night Ruins draws from the same series but widens the selection for Tokyo audiences. Hankins, writing on the work, has noted that however abstract the paintings appear, they remain grounded in figuration — often faint or fleeting in the finished canvas, but never fully erased.
For Cooke, night became a kind of "undoing" — a moment when the certainties built up in daylight could be taken apart again. "Night can be an undoing of all the things you thought were clear," he said, describing the paintings as a reflection on mistakes and on the things we take to be solid — a reckoning as much personal as artistic.
Courtesy Pace Gallery Courtesy Pace Gallery Courtesy Pace Gallery
Installation View courtesy Pace Gallery
That idea of undoing also connects to Cooke’s encounters with older Venetian painting. Cooke has pointed to Venice's own visual grammar — its landing stages, alleyways and campos — as a structural undercurrent in the work, alongside a close study of Bellini during his residency. He has also cited the newly restored Tintoretto paintings at the Gallerie dell'Accademia, particularly The Creation of Animals (c. 1551–52), as a touchstone for the loose, immediate handling that runs through the series.
Cooke described painting as a way of working around the authority his own mind can hold over him. "You can basically escape yourself with painting," he said, "and live a second personality through the paintings that actually helps you as a person." Thinking, he added, is often "the enemy of painting." Rather than allowing theory to dictate the work, he prefers to follow what he calls the organic nature of painting.
Alongside the Venice paintings, the exhibition includes a group of gouaches on paper from Cooke's Sea Mirror series, made on the Spanish island of Formentera using seawater as a working material. A separate related painting, Nemesis (2026), shown earlier this year at Art Basel, will appear in a group exhibition opening September 1 at Tokyo's Ueshima Museum.
Nigel Cooke, The Island, 2026 © Nigel Cooke, courtesy Pace Gallery
Born in Manchester in 1973, Cooke has been active in British painting since the late 1990s. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Goldsmiths, and his work is held in the collections of Tate, MoMA, the Guggenheim and LACMA, among others.
Cooke has described the Venice paintings as a kind of chamber holding overlapping phases of his own history as a painter — fitting, he said, for a city built from centuries of overlapping histories. "All of this work," he said, is "an attempt to escape the prison of my own perceptions."
——
Information
Nigel Cooke: Night Ruins
Date: August 28 - October 10, 2026
Address: Pace, Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A, 5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo
