ONLINE ONLY: APRIL 2025
VIEW IN GALLERY BY APPT
Montana Cooke paints from the inside of a feeling, not the story around it. The work starts hot, before anything is explained, and she follows that first surge until it finds shape. Emerging and based between Perth and London, she graduated with a BA Honours in Fine Art from Falmouth University in 2022.
Cooke’s process is physical and blunt. She layers, scratches back, cuts, repaints, rearranges, and leaves the edits visible. Working with acrylic, pastel, charcoal, pen, and oil bars, she builds surfaces that feel direct and alive. Against the constant pull of screens, Cooke prefers to keep her attention analogue. She draws instead of scrolling, and you can feel that discipline in the work, it is present and unperformative.
Her figures return and return again, not as characters but as evidence. Repetition becomes insistence, a way of testing the same emotion from different angles, with different force. Gesture, spacing, and small shifts in posture turn the surface into a charged room, where care and conflict jostle.
Cooke has exhibited in London and New York City, and this online exhibition brings together a focused suite of smaller works, marking her first presentation in Australia and with KolbuszSpace. Her gallery solo of oversized canvases at KS will follow in November 2026.
Image: 2 Yellow Figures. Acrylic, oil pastel, charcoal and pen on 140gsm acid free paper, 33 X 32CM