Alika Cooper's portraits, in gouache and oil, are intense, psychological, and difficult. Working with film stills taken from American movies released between 1950 and 1980, Cooper takes a "hyper-glamorized" image of femininity, and renders it grotesque. Her landscapes, meanwhile, are landscapes of poverty, each image carrying a threat, a sense of potential disruption, of psychic, or perhaps even social, unrest.
In addition to two solo shows at Wolfe Contemporary, she has staged solo exhibitions at Galleria Studio Legale in Rome, and Hamish Morrison Galerie in Berlin. Her works have been featured in the Crocker-Kingsley California Biennial, the DiRosa Preserve, and Paul Morris Gallery in New York. Her illustrations frequently appear in national publications, such as the New York Times Sunday Magazine. She received her MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2006. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
