Opening: Thursday 28 April, 6-8PM
PEER is pleased to present Silver Linings, a new exhibition by artist Marcus Cope and his first solo show in a public institution. Cope’s enigmatic paintings examine the unreliability of memory and how personal histories are recollected or recorded. Working with oil paint on coarse grain jute, cotton duck canvas and paper, Cope’s paintings reflect significant, complex, and often painful moments in his life. While most of the works presented are on large canvases, Cope fluctuates between scales, creating smaller paper studies or copies of larger works that revisit and merge existing paintings into new compositions.
The works in the exhibition include imagery that move between surreal encounters Cope experienced while travelling, to domestic frustrations, the demands of parenthood, and recollections of conflict in his own upbringing. In this new body of work, Cope explores these intimate and personal memories in often fragmented and abstracted form, inviting a myriad of new interpretations and reflections to unfold.
For this exhibition, PEER commissioned author and critic, Martin Herbert to write All the Feels, a text to accompany Cope’s new exhibition, which can be read on the following pages and accessed on PEER’s website.
