The Arc Between Two Deaths
Ethan Cook
February 19 – March 29, 2025

Megan Mulrooney is thrilled to present The Arc Between Two Deaths, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Ethan Cook. The exhibition will be on view at 7313 Santa Monica Blvd from February 19 – March 29 and features large-scale woven canvas paintings alongside a series of steel sculptures that capture life as an ongoing negotiation between stability and collapse.

The Arc Between Two Deaths takes its conceptual foundation from a dance principle of the same name, developed by Doris Humphrey in the 1920s. This theory maps the body’s movement between standing upright and falling over, a rhythm encapsulating the full range of human motion. Influenced by Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Humphrey framed this oscillation as an embodiment of the Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy: standing as rigid order (Apollo), falling as intoxicating abandon (Dionysus). Cook’s work moves within this arc, engaging rhythm, balance, and transformation—abstraction animated by movement, materiality, and the passage of time.

Cook’s steel sculptures, a new direction in his practice, and large-scale paintings explore such a tension. The sculptures serve as armatures, balancing rigidity and movement. While their structures echo minimalism and postminimalism, their fluidity calls to mind the dynamic unpredictability of dance. Cook’s paintings, with their curved forms, mirror the twisting motion of the sculptures, creating a dialogue between the two mediums. Together, they map the push and pull between order and entropy, capturing the precariousness of form as it breaks, reforms, and endures.

Among the key sculptural works is Area Moment, comprised of two I-beams bolted together, and In the Upper Room, a pair of steel red cubes recalling the fabricated precision of Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd. These forms align with the Apollonian ideal—precise, geometric, unyielding. Yet they are also elegiac: For Cook, the sculptures recall “watching a demolition across the water, and all that’s left is steel. Like our bones and the bones of our society.” The aging steel, inscribed with mill markings, resists a sense of Apollonian perfection, instead invoking history, entropy, and the inevitability of decay. By contrast, a wire-like sculpture titled The Dancer evokes Dionysian commotion, twisting and bending like Degas’ dancers—suggesting motion rather than imposing rigidity. Push Comes to Shove, an earthy yellow sculpture titled after Twyla Tharp’s ballet, consists of interlocking curved rectangles, echoing the undulating forms found in Cook’s paintings.

Cook’s large-scale paintings, Primary Accumulation I and Primary Accumulation II, reference Trisha Brown’s Primary Accumulation, a dance piece in which movements repeat and build as more dancers join. Similarly, Cook’s paintings feature curved rectangular forms radiating upward, their rhythmic compositions suspended between structure and collapse. Contorted, dancing bodies here are united and bound by color. Their scale invites a bodily relation, engaging the viewer in the same push and pull of movement and stillness that defines Cook’s sculptural work.

Cook’s work explores the fragility and persistence of form—how structures break and reform in endless cycles. The Arc Between Two Deaths is less an inquiry into stability than a reckoning with its impermanence, a distillation of form’s constant state of tension, where order and collapse remain in negotiation.

Ethan Cook (b. 1983, Tyler, Texas, US; lives and works in New York, NY, US) has had solo shows at Half Gallery, New York; Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen; Galerie Philipp Zollinger, Zurich; T293, Rome; Loyal Gallery, Stockholm; Nino Mier Gallery, New York and Brussels; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles; Noire Chapel, Torino; Bill Brady, Miami; Sunday-S Gallery, Copenhagen; American Contemporary, New York; Galerie Jeanroch Dard, Paris; Rod Barton, London; Patrick de Brock Gallery, Knokke; and Gana Art Hannam, Seoul.  His work has been covered in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Brooklyn Rail, Interview Magazine, Architectural Digest, among other publications. His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, the Museum Voorlinden, and the Foundation CAB, among others.