Ethan Cook

Interviews by Brainard Carey

New York-based artist Ethan Cook engages with materialism and minimalism through his two primary media, woven canvas and handmade paper. Cook’s paintings are composed of colored fabric panels that have been hand woven on a four-harness loom, stitched together, and stretched on bars. Foregoing the notion that in order to paint one must apply pigment to canvas in some way – be it by brush, by knife, or by hand – Cook instead uses a loom to weave large swaths of colored fabric that make up his surfaces. For Cook, the performance of artmaking is at once meditative and intensely rhythmic. The grandness of the loom, with its thousands of moving processes and parts, generates a symphony of action that is both quick and unpredictable, developing a variety of idiosyncrasies like a pulled thread or skipped knot, producing a variety of textures that reveal that the works are indeed, handmade.

Cook has had solo exhibitions at Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, Brussels, Marfa and New York; Megan Mulrooney Gallery, Los Angeles; Half Gallery, New York; Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen; Galerie Philipp Zollinger, Zurich; T293, Rome; Loyal Gallery, Stockholm; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles; Noire Chapel, Torino; Bill Brady, Miami; Sunday-S Gallery, Copenhagen; American Contemporary, New York; Galerie Jeanroch Dard, Paris; Rod Barton, London; Patrick de Brock Gallery, Knokke; and Gana Art Hannam, Seoul. Public collections include The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Voorlinden, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Fondation CAB, and Juan Carlos Maldonado Art Collection. His work has been covered in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Brooklyn Rail, Interview Magazine, Architectural Digest, among other publications.

Ethan Cook, Battement, 2025 Signed and dated on verso Hand-woven cotton 45 x 55 in (framed)

Ethan Cook, Sauter, 2025, Signed and dated on verso, Hand-woven cotton, 66 x 77 in (framed)

Ethan Cook, Beam Bathing Broken Circle, 2025 Steel 80 x 48 x 12 in 203.2 x 121.9 x 30.5 cm