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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, and following the success of her recent online show with KS, will present new and ambitious large-scale canvases in the gallery in Nov 2026, showing in Australia for the first time.

Paper Works, KolbuszSpace 2026 – CATALOGUE HERE

Click on artworks below for full details >