Group exhibitions include (Upcoming) Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990, touring exhibition, National Galleries Scotland: Modern, Edinburgh, and The Whitworth, University of Manchester (2025); (Upcoming) Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, Hayward Gallery Touring, Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham; Millenium Gallery, Sheffield; Dundee Contemporary Arts, UK (2024-2025); Mirror, Mirror, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, UK (2024); Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, Arnolfini Arts, Bristol, UK (2024); Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990, Tate Britain, London, UK (2023); Contested Bodies, Leeds University Galleries, Leeds (2023); Women and Water, Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge (2023); Towner 100: The Living Collection, Towner Eastbourne (2023); A Living Collection, Hepworth Wakefield (2023); Group Show, Aspex Portsmouth (2023); Act 1: Body en Thrall with the Rugby Collection, Rugby Art Gallery and Museum (2022); Hockney to Himid: 60 years of British Printmaking, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (2021); RA Portfolio Diamond Jubilee Gift, Queens Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, UK (2013-14); Hugh Stoneman – Master Printer, Tate St. Ives, Cornwall, UK (2008);Visual Wit, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (2004); The Contemporary Print Show Part I, The Barbican Centre, London, UK (1998); Contemporary Art at the Courtauld, Courtauld Institute, London, UK (1993); Innocence and Experience, touring exhibition organised by the South Bank Centre & Manchester City Art Gallery: Manchester, Hull, Nottingham, & Glasgow, UK (1992); Look Here Upon This Picture and On This, South Bank Centre, touring exhibition (1991-92); Postmodern Prints, Victoria & Albert Museum, London (1991); Picturing People, British Council tour to Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong & Singapore (1989); Women’s Images of Men, ICA, London, UK (1980).

 

Elected a Royal Academician in 2001, Eileen Cooper served as Keeper of the Royal Academy from 2010-17, becoming the first woman to be elected to the role since the RA began in 1768. In 2017 and 2009 she was nominated as coordinator of the Royal Academy Summer Show. Her work can be found in prominent public and private collections such as Arts Council Collection, UK; British Museum, UK; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, US; Kunsthalle Nuremberg, Germany; The Hepworth Wakefield, UK; The Tate Gallery, UK.

In this painting, as in several others in the series, the woman’s connection to the natural world, a latent wildness, is conveyed through the presence of an animal which also serves as a quiet companion or even a guardian. In Quest her fingertips brush the head of a cat, in Moon River a little dog lies against her body as she bathes in the moonlight while in Longing a cat’s dynamic crouched pose contrasts the woman’s inwardness. In Water Tiger the relationship between woman and animal is more mysterious.The tiger is trapped on a wooden rowing boat seemingly unaware of the woman who lies below beneath the surface of the water. They are separate but still connected: the woman’s huge, larger-than-life body almost cradles the boat or serves as a kind of island, a tether.

 

Throughout this body of work, water, like the night sky, is symbolic of a transitional state as well as relating to ideas around the subconscious, but it also serves for the characters as a kind of portal to a different time, place or mode of being. In Ripple, a woman reaches down from the branch of her tree to dip her finger into a pool of water, toying perhaps with the idea of crossing from one state, one life, into another while in Moonstone the central figure is contained within a kind of structure while outside a body (another version of the self?) lies curled up (sleeping or deceased?) on the shores of the beach. In Home, the figure appears to have fled whatever the building is behind her - a house, a studio, a church - onto a wooden pier. She is literally unclothed, clasping a model structure to her chest, the only possession that she is taking with her as she moves into the unknown.

 

Although a sense of longing or even melancholy runs through many of these works, Cooper’s women are not so much lost as undergoing or emerging from a process of self-realisation and maturation. Their wide eyes might be characteristic of Cooper’s figurative style but in this series they also become symbolic of a deep connection to and understanding of self.