Better Living at COOPER COLE, Toronto

COOPER COLE is pleased to present Better Living, a group exhibition featuring a selection of artists who share overlapping interests in form, flatness, stylization, architecture, and the poetic potential of everyday objects.

Ed Baynard (b. 1940, Washington, USA – d. 2016, New York, USA), is best known for his elegant and meditative still lives which often featuring botanical subjects and are rendered flat in a graphic style that blends historic Japanese printmaking and American modernism. His works can be found in many prominent collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, The Tate, London; Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, California; The High Museum, Georgia; Center for Contemporary Graphic Art, Sukagawa City, Fukushima, Japan; amongst others. This marks the first exhibition of Baynard’s works in Canada.

Holly Coulis (b. 1968, Toronto, Canada) continues to redefine the still-life tradition through her vibrant, multi-layered, and spatially dynamic paintings. Her work speaks visually about the intersection of everyday objects and abstract language; often merging abstraction and representation, with a focus on traditional still-life motifs like fruit, vases, and bottles.

Nathalie Du Pasquier (b. 1957, Bordeaux, France) is a pioneering figure who bridges postmodern design and contemporary art. A self-taught artist and designer, she is widely celebrated as one of the founding members of the iconic Italian design collective Memphis Group. Her distinct colour palette and architectural geometric style are rooted in her early Memphis aesthetic but have evolved into a refined exploration of form and space. Her multidisciplinary practice spans many different media merging pattern, object, architecture, and abstraction into a singular, evolving vision. This marks her second time exhibiting at the gallery following her solo exhibition of works on paper in 2016.

Van Maltese (b. 1988, Toronto, Canada) is a multidisciplinary artist whose works explore illusion, perception, and the brain’s playful capacity to see patterns where none may exist. Maltese’s practice blends painting, sculpture, installation, and video to interrogate how we decode visual information whether figure from ground, truth from trickery, or meaning from ambiguity. This conflict of perception aims to provoke the viewer’s brain into questioning reality.

Geoff McFetridge (b. 1971, Calgary, Canada) is a celebrated multidisciplinary artist, designer, and filmmaker whose deceptively simple visual language spans painting, drawing, ceramics, animation, public art, and graphic design. He is interested in how images exist in-between or outside of language, and in turn how this encourages more open-minded approaches to cognition. In his paintings, images become language; in the artist’s words, “it should feel like something, rather than look like something.” In the pictorial spaces he creates, definitions are less finite and can slip between interpretations. As indicated by their titles, many of his paintings whimsically play with the bodily experience of design, using simplified figures to both think about forms and collective experiences.

Matt Paweski (b. 1980, Detroit, USA) is a Los Angeles-based sculptor and designer whose work sits at the juncture of art, furniture, and industrial craft. His minimalistic approach to sculpture is ornamental yet restrained, and centres clean edges, crisp lines, and velvety colour fields. The objects themselves hold a functional ambiguity, often recognizable forms that are non functional and challenge the perceptual understanding of the viewer. Drawing from architectural motifs, joinery, and modernist design, his works engage with space through framing, balance, and an intimate sense of scale.

Clare Rojas (b. 1976, Columbus, USA) is a multidisciplinary artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, celebrated for her powerful fusion of folk-art narrative, geometric abstraction, and feminist storytelling. Her work creates psychological or spiritual environment, that feel intimate, protective, and ordered. A prominent figure in the Bay Area Mission School, Rojas’s work belongs to major institutions including Museum of Modern Art, New York; SFMOMA, Hammer Museum, Fine Arts Museums of SF, Berkeley Art Museum, and the Columbus Museum of Art, California; amongst others.

B. Wurtz (b. 1948, Pasadena, USA) is a New York-based artist whose playful yet meticulous practice bridges sculpture, painting, and assemblage. His works often incorporate found everyday objects to create sculptures that possess a formal beauty while preserving their innate banality. His work can be found in collections such as the Whitney Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; Portland Art Museum, Portland; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; amongst others.

Together, these artists offer a look at how form and familiarity shape our visual experience. Through their individual approaches to creation, each artist draws from the material and architectural conditions of everyday life to reimagine how objects and spaces can be seen, understood, and felt. Embracing flatness, structure, and symbolic ambiguity, this exhibition invites viewers to engage with the potential embedded in the ordinary and consider how the things we live with might live back through memory, gesture, and form.