England, 1936

MAURICE COCKRILL (born 1936, England) is one of the most respected painters in Britain today and a contemporary of R. B. Kitaj, Howard Hodgkin, David Hockney, John Hoyland and Malcolm Morley. Cockrill is an artist of exceptional range, quality and ambition, his work constituting a powerful defence of painting at a time when much younger artists are questioning its validity.

During the course of a lengthy career Cockrill's oeuvre has moved from tightly controlled synthetic realism based on photography to the exuberant abstract landscapes of today. Like painters Jean Dubuffet or Joan Miro, whom he admires, Cockrill has never been afraid of changing, even undermining his previous work in the search for the next way to express himself.

Keenly aware of art history and its influence, Cockrill's work approaches the problems and limitations of the art that has gone before him and seeks to contribute something new and original to the creative process.

Cockrill's work hangs in major museums and private collections in the UK, USA, Australia and Germany.

[Portrait image on right by Miki Slingsby]