Emma cc Cook

Public is pleased to present Bucolic Cob, Emma cc Cook’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Across eight heavily layered paintings of oil and acrylic on linen, Cook explores with systemic precision how accelerated capitalism and industrialization have cast shadows across rural America. Fields of layered oil paint fall into lines like troops in formation, serving as the building blocks for her expansive landscapes, punctuated by oval spectres hovering above the plains. Cook interweaves vignettes of performed domestic life, satirical windows that caricature the working man and the ‘good American.’ Her works serve as an archive, or perhaps a tombstone, blending speculative fiction with lived experience, capturing the no man’s land of the mid-west — a hybridization of its mythical past and forgotten future – while advancing a contemporary genre of American landscape painting.

Emma cc Cook (b. 1989, Minneapolis, MN, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include Caterpillar, Outer space, Concord (2024); Acre Eaters, Anonymous Gallery, New York (2024); Manners, Hayseed, 1226, Dallas (2024); Dibbler stick, Adams & Ollman, Portland (2023); Pilgrim, Public Gallery, London (2022); Flags, Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles (2022); Peeping Tom, Et Al, San Francisco (2022); and Milkman Pigeon, Half Gallery, New York (2021). She has participated in group exhibitions at Sixi Museum, Nanjing; Et al, San Francisco; Almine Rech, Brussels; Harpers, New York; 1226, Los Angeles; Adams & Ollman, Los Angeles; and Public Gallery, London. Select residencies include New York School of the Arts at Vytacil and Campos de Gutierrez in Medellin, Colombia. Cook received the MSAB grant, the Carter Prize in Painting and the Gay M. Grossman Memorial Scholarship.