Contemporary Art Matters

This month in our Viewing Room we are presenting “Still Life”, a group of drawings, paintings, and textile works exploring the rich spectrum of contemporary approaches to the still life genre.

While we are accustomed to admiring bouquets of flowers, what about the beauty of a prepared dish or the main course of a celebratory dinner? In Kira Nam Greene’s food-centric still lifes, her realistically rendered cuisine inhabits an environment of decorative patterns and multicultural motifs. Working in colored pencil, gouache, and watercolor, her works on paper blend observational detail with abstract elements, moving between real and imagined spaces.

Artist Cheryl Pope’s textile work, “Room with a Knife”, depicts blooms as they decline and drop from their container, recalling seventeenth-century Vanitas paintings. While the work reflects on the ephemeral, its flattened spatial construction and heightened color also situate it within a modernist lineage of expressive interior scenes. With the central composition and rich red background of the felt, inspiration from Édouard Manet and Henri Matisse comes through.

Kira Nam Greene, “Cool as a Cucumber in a Bowl of Hot Sauce”, 2013, colored pencil, gouache and watercolor on paper mounted on panel, 36 x 30 in.

Cheryl Pope, “Room with a Knife”, 2024, Needle-punched wool roving on cashmere, 12¾ x 11¼ in.

Artists featured in “Still Life”: Cooper Cox, Linda Gall, Daina Higgins, Kira Nam Greene, Cheryl Pope, andBilly Sullivan.

For inquiries contact Rebecca Ibel or Cathy Williard at [email protected] or 614-313-4360.

Contemporary Art Matters is pleased to introduce the work of Cooper Cox in the exhibition “Still Life”. His painting “April” will be showing in our Viewing Room through May.

Cooper Cox is a New York–based painter whose work explores the intersections of contemporary landscape and technological imaging. Working in oil, Cox builds richly textured surfaces by layering dense paint over flattened grounds to hallucinatory effect. His compositions are hybridized constructions; scenes of nature that are formed in collaboration with tools of augmented reality. Drawing from a romantic vernacular of landscape painting and his own experience growing up in the Intermountain West, Cox’s work blurs distinctions between kitsch and the parapastoral, scenes that wander an uncanny valley between the natural and synthetic. The optically charged works invite prolonged looking, proposing painting as an experiential site where technology, perception and myth coalesce.
Cooper Cox (b. 1978, Sun Valley, Idaho) received his dual BA in philosophy and sociology from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He spent the earlier part of his artistic career directing Outside Magazine shows & events and in his creative design firm collaborating with brands including Hermès, Tom Ford, and Nike. Cox’s paintings have been exhibited at venues including Gavlak Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; The Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach, FL; OCHI and the Sun Valley Museum of Art in Sun Valley, ID; and Harkawik and 52 Walker in New York, NY. His work has been featured and reviewed in publications including Here + There, Architectural Digest, Sun Valley Property News, Idaho Mountain Express, and Cool Hunting. Cox lives and works between Brooklyn, NY and Sun Valley, ID and is represented by OCHI.

First Image, Courtesy of the Artist and OCHI, photo by Callum Stearns.
Second Image, “April”, 2024, oil on canvas, 36 x 24 in.

Artists featured in “Still Life” Cooper Cox, Linda Gall, Carlos Gamez de Francisco,Daina Higgins, Kira Nam Greene, Cheryl Pope,Billy Sullivan, and Liz Trapp

For inquiries contact Rebecca Ibel or Cathy Williard at [email protected] or 614-313-4360.