New directions in abstract art

Elizabeth Cooper

US artist Elizabeth Cooper has described her painting as dealing with 'various abstract tropes and a rigorous commitment to process'. The tropes to which she refers reflect the work of the Abstract Expressionists, whose painterly currency of dripping, splashing and pouring Cooper freely adopts.

While the process of art-making is clearly exposed by such methods, Cooper encourages such revelation in more ways than one.

She combines a variety of mediums - gloss and enamel paints, resins or colour straight from the tube - allowing their differing drying times to affect her works' surface. Pools of colour form puckered skins, pigments curdle or interact unexpectedly.

Her practice, in short, is as much about unpredictability as it is her own decision-making, and although there's nothing new in this - back to those 'various abstract tropes' - her palette of candy colours and lustrous gloss surfaces reflect an updated take on historic genres.

US abstract artists | UK abstract artists | German abstract artists

 

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