COOPER COLE Exhibits, I saw her duck, a solo works by Van Maltese

Geoff McFetridge Nature Mart Van Maltese I saw her duck Closing January 20, 2024 COOPER COLE is pleased to present Nature Mart, a solo exhibition with Geoff McFetridge. This marks the artists fourth exhibition at the gallery.   In this exhibition, McFetridge focuses on our human connection to the natural world and prompts viewers to question its role in our lives. Do we merely exploit nature for nourishment, wealth, and entertainment, or are we part of a larger, interdependent system? Through a tantric and transitive process of mark making, these images evolve from an abstract state of the unknown, and are revealed organically during the creative process. In this body of work, McFetridge aims to explore and expand on his conceptual thought processes related to ideas of understanding and evolution. These paintings are meant to question modes of consciousness, intelligence, empathy, ethics, freedom, and responsibility, while encouraging a contemplation of our place within the natural world and the larger ecosystem.   Geoff McFetridge (b. 1971, Calgary, Alberta, Canada) is interested in how images exist in-between or outside of language, and in turn how this encourages more open-minded approaches to cognition. In his paintings, images become language; in the artist’s words, “it should feel like something, rather than look like something.” In the pictorial spaces he creates, definitions are less finite and can slip between interpretations. As indicated by their titles, many of his paintings whimsically play with the bodily experience of design, using simplified figures to both think about forms and collective experiences. McFetridge received his BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. McFetridge was part of the infamous Beautiful Losers exhibition which debuted in downtown New York in 1991 and went on to tour the world. He has continued to exhibit in international galleries including Cooper Cole, Toronto; Half Gallery, New York; V1 Gallery, Copenhagen; Gallery Target, PlayMountain, Tokyo; and Heath Gallery, Los Angeles. McFetridge has also been included in museum exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; Contemporary Calgary, Calgary; the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Yale University Art Museum, New Haven; Museum of African American Art (MAAA), and The Geffen Contemporary at MoCA; Los Angeles. McFetridge currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California, USA. info@coopercolegallery.com +1.416.531.8000 coopercolegallery.com

COOPER COLE 1134 + 1136 Dupont St., Toronto, Ontario M6H 2A2, Canada Thursday - Saturday: 12 - 6pm info@coopercolegallery.com +1.416.531.8000 Instagram coopercolegallery.com #coopercolegallery#foneartmagazine#fineartfun

Cooper Cole Gallery exhibits G.B.Jones August 6th

G.B. JONES Organized by Kunstverein Toronto in collaboration with D St-Amour August 6 - September 10, 2022   Opening reception and book signing: Saturday August 6, 5-7pm   G.B. Jones is recognized for many accomplishments: for the success of her post-punk band Fifth Column (1981-2002), the widespread influence of the many queer punk zines she co-authored, including J.D.s, Double Bill and Hide, her coining of the term “queercore,” and her prolific work as a “no-budget” filmmaker, scene photographer and visual artist. Her drawing series, “Tom Girls,” originally published in J.D.s, replaced Tom of Finland’s iconic, “hyper-virile studs” with bold, uncompromising leather dykes, co-opting Finland’s objectified, male-on-male erotica and presenting a world of “nasty female role models.”   In 1994, Feature gallery and the publishing imprint Instituting Contemporary Idea in New York released G.B. Jones, a monograph compiling Jones’ “Tom Girls” drawings alongside show and film posters, record covers, comics and commissioned writing. As part of a campaign by the Canadian Border Services agency against allegedly pornographic or immoral materials in the 1990s, copies of Jones’ book were seized by the Canada Border Services Agency and barred from entering the country on the charge of depicting “bondage.” Jones was later informed that the seized copies had been burned by Border Control agents.   27 years later, in collaboration with Jones, Kunstverein Toronto is putting G.B. Jones back in circulation in Canada. A re-publication of the book will launch on August 6 at Cooper Cole alongside an exhibition of related drawings, photographs, posters, ephemera and tributes that reflect the reach and influence of Jones’ heterogenous practice, both at the time of the original release of G.B. Jones, and today. This project was curated by Kunstverein Toronto together with research and publication direction by D St-Amour.   “Dodie Bellamy on G.B. Jones’s Nasty Female Role Models” Frieze Issue 200, Jan 9, 2019   G.B. Jones (b. Bowmanville, Ontario, Canada) is an artist, filmmaker, musician, and publisher of zines. Jones’ drawings first received notoriety when published in the Toronto-based queer punk zine J.D.s that she ran with Bruce LaBruce. Her prolific drawing series Tom Girls is widely recognized, and reimagines Tom of Finland’s drawings by replacing all the hyper-masculine subjects with women, subverting the intent into a contribution to third-wave feminist art. In 2002, Jones began a series of collaborative collages with Paul P., many of which were published in the book A Queer Anthology of Rage. Jones’ spray-painted images of Ionian columns - one of which is permanently installed at Cooper Cole - references her post-punk band Fifth Column (1981–2002) and suggests the weaving together of her music and drawing practice.   Jones has exhibited her art nationally and internationally since the early 1990s, in spaces such as Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus; Participant Inc., New York; Mercer Union, Toronto; The Power Plant, Toronto; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; White Columns, New York; AKA Artist Run Space, Winnipeg; Muncher Kunstverein, Munich; and Schwules Museum, Berlin.  She was included in the 2012 exhibition This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1990s, which was curated by Helen Molesworth for the MCA Chicago and subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the ICA Philadelphia. She has also exhibited at national and international galleries including David Zwirner, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto; Feature, New York; Galerie Clark, Montreal; and Or Gallery, Vancouver. G.B. Jones lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and is represented by Cooper Cole.   Kunstverein Toronto is a curatorial and publishing platform operating alongside its partners in Amsterdam, Aughrim, Milan and New York. Moveable in both time and space, Kunstverein Toronto is dedicated to experimentation, discussion and hospitality in art, exhibition and publication practices. Fundamentally, Kunstverein Toronto seeks to foster exchange between local and international conversations, contexts and generations. Kunstverein Toronto was founded in 2014 by Kara Hamilton and Kari Cwynar. We program in dialogue with a local advisory board as well as an international group of artists, curators, thinkers and enthusiasts.     D St-Amour is a writer, curator and book maker currently located in Tio'tia:ke - Mooniyang (Montreal).   G.B. JONES Organized by Kunstverein Toronto in collaboration with D St-Amour August 6 - September 10, 2022   Opening reception and book signing: Saturday August 6, 5-7pm For sales and press inquiries please contact the gallery:  info@coopercolegallery.com +1.416.531.8000 coopercolegallery.com #coopercolegallery#fineartmagazine#sunstormartfun

Happy Holidays for the Cooper Cole Gallery!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS from your friends at COOPER COLE! We wish you all the best for the holiday season and new year. The gallery offices will be closed until Wednesday January 6, 2021. For your viewing pleasure, we have installed four sculptures by Elias Hansen in our window which can be viewed 24/7. #coopercole#fineartmagazine#artfun

COOPER COLE Gallery: Daniel Rios Rodriguez Another Fire October 25 - opening 9-9, runs through December 21, 2019,

Daniel Rios Rodriguez Another Fire October 25 - December 21, 2019 Opening reception: Friday October 25 2019, 6 - 9pm COOPER COLE is pleased to present a solo exhibition featuring the works of Daniel Rios Rodriguez. This marks the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Another Fire asserts a primacy to the sun in Rodriguez’s painterly symbology. Ecological upheaval from the latter half of the twentieth century onward has multiplied, deepened, and accelerated temporalities, as a result, confusing our sense of time. Ruminating on a news cycle which points to impending civilizational collapse—the menace of rising waters and temperatures, proliferating wildfires, mass extinctions—Rodriguez, in this recent body, pays tribute to the sun as our most primordial temporal compass, honouring its capacity to both guide life on Earth and, as of late, incinerate it. Perfectly circular or herringbone shaped concrete slabs form the pictorial ground for each painting. Rope wraps the picture plane’s perimeter as both formal rhyme and framing device. Depictions of the sun vary, manifest in spiral symbols, more realist representations, or mashes of glyphs. Every work is nevertheless conceived as a kind of record of it, inflected by the artist’s stylish ingenuity, less document than totem. Daniel Rios Rodriguez’s votive practice positions itself in an ancient lineage “of all those other creators who,” for time immemorial, “were worshipping the sun in a real way.”  Daniel Rios Rodriguez (b. 1978, Killeen, Texas) received his MFA from Yale in 2007 and is a 2013 recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. Rodriguez has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada; Nicelle Beauchene, White Columns, Martos Gallery, New York; Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Los Angeles; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, USA; Lulu, Mexico City, Mexico; Galeria Fortes D’aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo, Brazil; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland and has forthcoming exhibitions at San Antonio Museum of Art, and Artpace, San Antonio, USA. Rodriguez lives and works in San Antonio, USA.  Daniel Rios Rodriguez Another Fire October 25 - December 21, 2019 COOPER COLE 1134 Dupont St. Toronto, Ontario M6H2A2 Canada info@coopercolegallery.com +1.416.531.8000 coopercolegallery.com #art#coopercole#danielriosrodriguez#fineartmagazine

Cooper Cole Gallery: Holly Coulis Island June 30 - August 4, 2018 Opening reception: Saturday June 30, 6-8pm

Holly Coulis Island June 30 - August 4, 2018 Opening reception: Saturday June 30, 6-8pm COOPER COLE is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Holly Coulis. This marks the artists first solo exhibition with the gallery. Titled Island, this exhibition features a suite of new paintings that engage line, colour, and space as the basis of consideration to Holly’s study of still life and landscape painting. In respect to content and composition the two genres blur together naturally. Grapefruits astral plane above tabletops as orange suns rise over a desert scene. Cherries reflect off of mirrored water. A balanced papaya feels weighted like a mighty papaya tree rooted on the horizon. Holly’s show title refers to the idea of a painting acting as a place of containment. As such the canvas can be thought of as a tabletop, or a separate world. There is an energy in these paintings that can’t be denied. Holly’s lines vibrate off the surface, challenging the two dimensional confines of her medium. Her imagery is abstracted, so that representational images of everyday objects can be read simply as geometric forms. Colour becomes paramount as does the space given to the shapes. These paintings radiate in a way that upends our preconceptions of the still-life. Holly Coulis (b. 1968, Toronto, Canada) received her BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She had solo show at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York; Sardine, Brooklyn; Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, USA; Claudia Groeflin Gallery, Zurich; Groeflin Maag Galerie, Basel, Switzerland; Simon Lee, London, United Kingdom. She has shown her work at such galleries as Jack Hanley, New York; Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, USA; Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada; Mikiko Sato Gallery, Hamburg, Germany; Anna Marra Contemporanea, Rome; Galleria d’Art Moderna, Milan; Galerie Glance, Turin, Italy; and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden. Coulis currently lives and works in Athens, Georgia, USA. Holly Coulis Island June 30 - August 4, 2018 COOPER COLE 1134 Dupont St. Toronto, Ontario M6H2A2 Canada info@coopercolegallery.com +1.416.531.8000 coopercolegallery.com #fineartmagazine

Cooper Cole Gallery: Sara Cwynar Soft Film MMK 1 Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany September 29 - November 5, 2017

Sara Cwynar Soft Film MMK 1 Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany September 29 - November 5, 2017 Sara Cwynar is the recipient of the 18th Baloise Art Prize. In a manner as entertaining as it is complex, her work Soft Film (2016) explores fundamental aspects of photography, its production and its dissemination in digital and analogue systems. The film features other people's discarded objects, purchased by the artist on eBay, as well as photographs she has acquired in a second-hand shop, all of which she collects, organizes and archives according to colour, material and content. The work also addresses topics of relevance to society, for example the circulation and value of objects or feminist themes, as well as the meaning of personal and historical occurrences. For more information about the exhibition please visit MMK 1 Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main. For more information about Sara Cwynar please contact: COOPER COLE 1134 Dupont St. Toronto, Ontario M6H2A2 Canada info@coopercolegallery.com +1.416.531.8000 coopercolegallery.com #fineartmagazine