Eileen Cooper: Ambivalence And Desire

This summer, a new exhibition of unseen drawings by Eileen Cooper RA, spanning the years 1977 to 1983, will go on display at Huxley-Parlour, London. As well as giving an insight into Cooper’s early practice, this exhibition looks to contextualise her work as fundamentally linked to the radical feminist politics of that era. The exhibition also highlights her as a bold, uncompromising voice of the time.

In this seminal group of works on paper, unseen until now, Cooper presents the fraught energy of this period in history, including the fight for sexual and political freedom. The drawings chart a formative six years for the artist, between graduation from the RCA and the birth of her first child. Cooper’s drawings from this period chronicle an intense investigation of personal identity and sexuality but also represent experimentation with process, material and form.

These works come from a time when many of her female contemporaries were eschewing drawing and painting in favour of performance and conceptual practices. Cooper’s unflinching and figurative works on paper are, therefore radical in both their choice of medium and their subject matter. Although many works are abstracted, the subject matter remains highly personal and highly charged. Cooper states that the works ‘laid the groundwork’ for themes and motifs that her later career would come to encompass.