The mission of the University of Fontbonne Gallery of Fine Arts is to encourage and support artists and visual arts education in the community through its exhibitions and programs. Fontbonne University Fine Arts Gallery values artists and their work by promoting and supporting them through exhibitions, gallery talks, education, and information programs.
Nicole Cooper’s exhibition Pivotal, new life-size figurative oil paintings, explores humanity as a living, developing force. Humanity is at a turning point. There are profound changes and events that can affect humanity both positively and negatively. The fine art gallery wants to help attract audiences to the artist’s work by providing the community with a platform to view quality art.
In Fontbonne university fine art gallery, they believe in creating an educational environment in which artists and audience can interact for a more personal art experience. They serve Artists – young, emerging, and professional.
The fine art gallery reaches out to these communities by providing professional art programs and encouraging the participation of artists through a variety of learning opportunities. The renovation of the fine art gallery was generously funded by Fontbonne Community Connection in January 2011.
Cooper’s paintings are a vivid expression of feelings and vitality within our body of flesh and blood. This is Cooper’s third solo exhibition, which features about a dozen paintings.
Nicole Cooper at Fontbonne University Fine Art Gallery
Rise (2020) is a diptych of several figures simultaneously appearing and moving towards the fiery landscape.
The rate of global warming is emulated by the steep curve of a billowing mountain of excess. It extends over the figures in another panel of the diptych. The steep curve has been at a precise slope from 1983, when Cooper was born, to the present day.
Movement and forward movement is a constant motive in Cooper’s works, especially in the painting Signals (2020).
In this picture, a naked woman is walking in front. Cooper draws the pivoting movement of the figure that follows her. The woman’s vagus nerve, which originates in the core of the trunk, is subtly emphasized by the artist. This nerve is responsible for our good feelings and controls our autonomic nervous system.
Cooper uses the velature technique, which shows us a bright red underpainting, symbolically revealing internal processes such as thoughts and feelings.
Nicole Cooper lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri.
She holds a BA from the Kansas City Institute of Art (Kansas City, MO) and graduated from the Yale School of the Arts at Yale University (Norfolk, Connecticut). Cooper’s previous solo exhibitions have taken place at the Schmidt Center for the Arts (Belleville, Illinois) and Space Architecture and Design (St. Louis, Missouri). The artist has exhibited in several group exhibitions in COCA Millstone Gallery, Art St. Louis, and the Foundry Art Center.
