iFondazione Querini StampaliaCastello
Nigel Cooke: Bad Habits
British painter Nigel Cooke's first solo show in Italy, staged during the 2026 Biennale in the library's portego, transformed into an artist's studio.
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These five paintings hang in the room where they were made. This spring Nigel Cooke became the Fondazione's first artist in residence, and the Portego della Biblioteca, the long hall beside the historic library overlooking the Rio di Santa Maria Formosa, was his studio.
The canvases are big and dark. Two are roughly 8 feet square, and inky purples and blue-blacks carry bodies, animals and geometric shapes that surface and sink again. Cooke began in Athens, sketching broken statues, and painted the Greek word thraûsma (ruin, trauma, fragment) onto the canvases early on. You can lean in looking for the letters and won't find them: they're buried under later layers.
The curator calls the work deliberately "elusive and open-ended", so come to look rather than to decode. Cooke even worked the swaddled baby from Bellini's Presentation at the Temple, in the museum's own collection, into an early study for Night Ruins. The €15 day ticket (€12 reduced, free under 18) covers this show, the collections and the Scarpa garden.
Look for
2 in the AM-PM
Look for a glowing orb set between an inky purple, blue-black ground and a storm of lines; the curator notes you can't tell whether it is rising or setting.
Night Ruins
Look for the hottest canvas, reds, oranges and yellows swirling almost all over, nearly swallowing a half-circle and a barely visible sail-like shape.
Cabin Fever
Look for a tall canvas whose central band of flesh tones tangles human and animal bodies, with a bull's head rising above and bright lines streaking down like lightning.
The Hour of the Monkey
Look for green, purple, ochre and lapis blue around pink flesh tones, and a rectangle the curator reads as a mirror.
Good for
- An Hour Or Less
- Locals Who've Seen It All
- Nerding Out
Skip if
You want recognisable pictures: figures only half-surface in these mostly abstract canvases.
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Image credits
9
- Nigel Cooke: Bad Habits© Nigel Cooke, courtesy Pace Gallery
- Amoako BoafoCourtesy of Museo di Palazzo Grimani
- The Silks of Lucio AndrichCourtesy of Palazzo Mocenigo – Museum of Textiles and Costume
- Venice Pavilion: Note PersistentiCourtesy of La Biennale di Venezia (Giardini & Arsenale)
- Fondazione Querini StampaliaDidier Descouens / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Museo di Palazzo GrimaniSailko / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Palazzo Ducale (Doge's Palace)Didier Descouens / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Ocean Space (Chiesa di San Lorenzo)Didier Descouens / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Museo Archeologico Nazionale di VeneziaAbxbay / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain