Opus Art, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Tintin Cooper Biography

Tintin Cooper’s artworks are curious deconstructions, informed by press and media imagery. Most recently these works have focused on the spectacle of football, the players and managers in relation to the audience. The collages weave and repeat images of sports heroes and managers. Faces are obscured in what visually resembles Cubist deconstruction, or on a more sinister level, the masking of facial features in the media as an attempt to conceal identity.

Disappearing (and remerging) is a common theme in Tintin Cooper’s work as the figures and faces are obscured, reconfigured or simply cut away. The new figures (mostly footballer portraits) seem to exist partially in the physical world but also point to another, unknown mysterious world.

The new images are also particularly insightful to the mundane journey images face today, as they are spliced and mutated by designers, bloggers, media, and are in constant flux. Some of the works also seem to 'freeze' that process, for example they also resemble internet jpegs that are exploded into bits and bytes, whilst travelling through ether/cables and being reconfigured onto other computer screens worldwide.

In the past Tintin Cooper has also appropriated footage and images of emperors, football managers, Hollywood actors and politicians. The kingly and powerful, and their subsequent (or expected) downfall are implied across all the works, reflecting a cultural obsession with footballers and celebrities that is not dissimilar to earlier times where a dictator's images bought him, not only to fame and power, but close to divinity.

Tintin Cooper was born in Bangkok, Thailand and lives and works in Bangkok and London. She has been artist in resident at Silpakorn University (Bangkok), Tokyo Wonder Site (Tokyo), About Cafe-AARA (Bangkok), and Kurt Schwitter's Merzbarn (Lake District, UK). She has lectured and given talks at Mahidol, Chulalongkorn, Silpakorn and Bangkok Universities, and started the Conference of Birds project space in Bangkok. She recently completed her Masters at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, under an AHRC award during 2009-2011.

Recent exhibitions include Bangkok Reprise at Chulalongkorn Art Center in Bangkok, Props at Guest Projects in London, More to Love, ArtAids (ChiangMai, Bangkok and Barcelona), Face a Faces at Tang Gallery (Bangkok), Lifeboat 2251 at Gallery 4A, Sydney, and solo shows at PSG Gallery, Silpakorn University and Siam Art Space, both Bangkok. Museum exhibitions include Prenzlauer Museum, Berlin, CMU Museum in ChiangMai, and Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou.