If.... Richard Cook

Sheffield based Artist Richard Cook continues g39’s If…., a season of exhibitions giving emerging artists the chance to show new work to a new audience. Richard's work is inviting, yet awkward and unpredictable. Complicating the pictorial space of photographic works with bold, intrusive objects, Richard produces a distinct contrast between nature's roundness and the hard edges of human involvement.


Through these simple means - basic maskings, removals, and additions, Richard presents a subject-object hierarchy. His new work is a renegotiation and rearrangement of presentation, material, ideas and subjects. With careful consideration and awareness to authorship, colour, and engagement with the technical processes of installation, Richard’s work for If…. encompasses image and video with a deliberate nudge towards the architecture of the exhibition space.

His work and practice suggests the need to revaluate seemingly stable beliefs, yet wonderfully manages to avoid the complexities that usually accompanies such fundamental pondering. In the context of a near-collapse of our contemporary socio-political world, Richard’s work also quietly promotes an economy of scale, means, re-use, transparency, and the power and beauty of bare essentials.

This show was selected by
  • Michael Cousin

    Programme