Biografie:
Coop - aka Chris Cooper - Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1968.
Coop finished high school, skipped art school, and arrived in Los Angeles in the late 80’s where he immediately got to work subverting the mainstream. Chances are good you’ve seen some manifestation of his merchandising juggernaut: smoking devils, devil-girls, hotrods, space aliens or monsters on posters, t-shirts, hats, stickers, stationery sets, skate boards, toys, shot glasses, Zippo lighters, and so much more.
He’s done roughly 100 posters, including rock posters for Nirvana, Soundgarden, The Sex Pistols and many others, and album cover art for everyone from the Monomen to the Ramones.
The first edition of The Devil’s Advocate, his full-color book was released to an immediate sellout in November 2001, and went immediately into continuous reprint. Coop’s second book, THE BIG FAT ONE, a 1008-page sketchbook, was released in October 2002. According to Juxtapoz Magazine, Coop’s name is “now more recognizable to modern youth than that of Rembrandt.“
He cites Robert Williams, R. Crumb and Eric Stanton as some of his favorites and great influences, in addition to Big Daddy Roth, Irving Klaw, Wally Wood, Gil Elvgren, and a host of other degenerates.
Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame houses two of Coop’s posters in its permanent collection. He was also commissioned to customize an Escalade and design a run of limited edition gambling chips for the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas.
Coop’s first solo exhibition was in Los Angeles in 1993, and since then his artwork has been shown throughout the world. View his full resume here.
In 2007, following a car accident that broke his leg and kept him from painting for months, Coop rekindled his lifelong interest in photography. To date he has more than 20,000 images posted on Flickr, and is in the process of collecting photos for a new book.
The follow-up collection to Devil’s Advocate is also in the works, as Coop never stops creating.
Coop and Ruth make their home in Los Angeles.
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“Coop’s vision, custom built for speed desire, flaming and fetishist, is the quintessence of Southern California car culture distilled through punk rock aggression and grunge angst.“ -C-Pop gallery
“The icons he has made his own bear witness to both his artistic skill and savvy marketing. The work is accessible, instantly identifiable and so informed that it also serves as a virtual catalogue of pop culture from the 1930s through the mid-1960s.“ -CR Stecyk III, interview for Juxtapoz Magazine
“What Coop seems to know better than most in this culture of denial, is the potency of seemingly empty and quotidian signs to provoke – how the subliminal lingua of subversion can work simultaneously with the sanctioned language of seduction. He knows how to tap into our psychic primordial pop-ooze of horror, vulgarity, and degeneration, and then how to wrap it all up in the sweetest sugar-coated confections of tasty tease.” - Carlo McCormick, from his introduction to Devil’s Advocate, the Art of Coop.
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