Image: Nigel Cooke, The Island, 2026 © Nigel Cooke — courtesy Pace Gallery, Tokyo
Pace Gallery will present 'Night Ruins', an exhibition of new paintings by Nigel Cooke, at its Tokyo gallery in Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A from 28 August to 10 October 2026. It is the British artist’s first solo presentation in Tokyo, and it opens in the week of Tokyo Gendai 2026, with a reception on Friday 28 August from 4 to 7 pm at 5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku.
The exhibition brings together a group of small-scale, atmospheric paintings that Cooke made during his tenure at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia’s first artist residency, held in Venice in spring 2026. Pace describes the residency as a period of immersion in the city and its lagoon, canals and particular light, from which Cooke produced a series of richly hued works drawing on the palazzo’s history as well as the everyday fabric of Venice.
'Night Ruins' extends Cooke’s ongoing Venice exhibition 'Bad Habits', organised on the occasion of the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia and curated by Evelyn C. Hankins, which shows a selection of the paintings in the building where they were made. The Tokyo presentation widens that selection, setting the same series against a contemporary metropolis and emphasising the works’ layered relationship to time.
Cooke, who has been stretching the boundaries of figurative painting since the late 1990s, merges figurative forms with abstract, elemental atmospherics; Pace notes that his recent work draws on fields from palaeontology and neuroscience to classical mythology and zoology, with a linear construction that recalls brain circuitry, bodies and landscape formations at once. A press release for the exhibition is available on the gallery’s exhibition page.
The show was announced in Pace’s Asia newsletter, which paired it with a separate debut solo presentation by Friedrich Kunath, 'The Nearest Faraway Place', at the gallery’s Seoul space from 1 September to 24 October, opening during Frieze Seoul 2026.
