2009.28, Nigel Cooke, Thinker's Retreat, 2008

In this impressively scaled and composed painting, Nigel Cooke presents a fantasy-laden tableau of a broken-down, modernist-looking dystopian architecture that houses what may be the last of the thinkers referenced in the title. The curious central figure wields the hardware of a painter and seems to be going about his craft in a desolate world of abjectness and neglect. In this scene, science fiction, comic books, and art history are all rolled into one, creating an ominous yet somehow playful allegory of the “heroic” artist’s solitary studio practice and the often-heralded death of painting.

Gabriel Ritter, DMA Label copy, 2014.

Until 2009: Stuart Shave/Modern Art LLP, London, England 

From 2009: Dallas Museum of Art and The Rachofsky Collection, purchased from above [1]

[1] See invoice #02385 in Collections Records Object File 2009.28

Apply to objects where number equals 2009.28