MARCUS COPE

Marcus Cope’s studio is across the yard, in the corner overlooking the creek, overshadowed during some parts of the day by the DLR that slides through the sky only 20m from the windows. It is a tall space with a small office tucked up into the ceiling like a private box overlooking the stage. He is a painter of life in all its ordinary strangeness

‘Life experiences. Memories. Dreams. Cyprus… It’s very diaristic. Things resonate. Sometimes, I’m not sure why, they can become an obsession…’
(MC in conversation with Diana Copperwhite on painttube.

Amongst many other things, he studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design, has taught at Anglia Ruskin, Camberwell and Turps Art School and helped set up the Marmite Prize for painting. But his paintings speak for him.

Recent exhibitions have included Pareidolia, Daniel Benjamin Gallery, London 2019; the Drawing Biennial 2019, Drawing Room, London; and Right Behind the New Museum, 195 Chrystie Street, New York.

LINKS

Sacha Craddock, on Stealing from the natives, 2017:

‘…the man in a chair within a worn wall appears to have been there a long time. The area he inhabits is small, with plants and pots painted in a heightened and somewhat separate manner. Narrative and reality crash loosely together within a strange range of reference. The sea beyond is grey. Any figure tends to look like an actor in a toy theatre tipped in from the side…’

(from the catalogue to the 2018 solo show MOONLIGHTING at studio1.1 London
© Sacha Craddock 2018)

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