Ethan Cook

Ethan Cook is a contemporary American artist, who uses simple shapes and a limited color pallet to create bold and beautiful works.

Ethan Cook was born in Tyler, Texas in 1983. He says that he has always considered himself a painter, but liked the idea of using the canvas as the painting itself. He said that he, “wanted to take away the barrier that the paint presented, the kind of physical barrier, no matter how small it was, presented by a layer of paint.”

Instead of using paint for color, Cook began to weave large swaths of color, and mounted them on stretchers, as you would a canvas.

In 2013, Cook had solo exhibits in New York, London and Paris, and his work was included in the 2014 Artists to Watch Exhibition in Miami.

After several years of weaving, Cook began to create three-dimensional sculptures,  inspired by a trip to his aunt’s house in Gladewater, Texas. He became fascinated with the knick-knacks that she collected, as well as the personal objects he saw in a London Airbnb, many of them devotional objects like images of the Virgin Mary, angels and cherubs. “Through these mass-produced icons, you get an idea of the culture as a whole through a minisection of someone’s home or personal taste,” he says, explaining that he was fascinated by “the things we choose to produce and the things we choose to keep.”

Ethan Cook is continuously experimenting with new materials, like wood and aluminum and has even been using paint in many of his recent works.

Cook works and lives in Brooklyn, with his wife, fashion designer Wray Serna. The couple also has a house in the Catskills.

His unique works have been shown widely in the U.S., Europe, Japan and Korea and have done well at Phillip’s, Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses. In 2019, his work was included in the annual Art Brussels fair in Belgium, that spotlights unconventional process and materials.