Dead Reckoning by Emeritus Professor Michael David Cook

Opening reception: Friday, October 24, 2025, 5:00-7:00 PM

Dead Reckoning, Paintings 2016-2025

Anima(s) River of Souls are paintings informed by the geographic, geologic, atmospheric, cultural and directional color of New Mexico. Dead Reckoning, the title of this exhibition, comes from the nautical term “dead reckoning”, which is a navigational method employed by a navigator that would start at a known or assumed position (in Polynesia these are islands) and then calculate speed, time and direction of travel to understand one’s current position. The Rhumb works are inspired by European maps from the age of discovery (the 15th century to the late 18th centuries) employing a totally different methodology for navigation. They are the companions to the body of work titled Dead Reckoning. The Itch! paintings, are metaphors, addressing such complexities as health, both physical and mental while navigating through periods of one’s life. They are straight from the “Id” and are another form of mapping or way finding. The paintings are informed by what the artist understands as his needs, wants, desires, and impulses as he navigates through the world.

These paintings challenge how we see by employing figurative abstraction to partially obfuscate and shield from view certain information, forcing the viewer to look at the imagery below, to go beyond the optical effects, making our minds and memories do the work of filling in missing thoughts. The painting technique combined with the artist creating images from the daily news while watching TV, provokes imagery from the “Id” and provides a deeper conceptual underpinning for the work beyond the visual and optical effects of the paintings.

Michael David Cook’s work have been exhibited in such venues as The New Museum, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Art Institute of Chicago; Albuquerque Museum; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art; Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe; Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art Chicago; University Art Museum, University of Arizona, Tucson, Museum of Fine Arts; The Museum School Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts, Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe as well as commercial galleries. Exhibitions have received critical attention in The New York Times; Art News; The New Art Examiner; The San Francisco Chronicle and THE Magazine among others. His work is in a number of public and private collections. He has been the recipient of awards such as Illinois Arts Council Individual Visual Artist Fellowship, Outstanding Teacher of the Year at UNM and a prestigious National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artists Fellowship.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog. Gebert Contemporary specializes in contemporary painting, sculpture and photography from an international group of artists. While most of the gallery artists are mid-career and established, we also exhibit a small number of emerging artists. Exhibited artists come from, Belgium, Germany, Mexico, Spain and the United States. Gebert Contemporary is located at 558 Canyon Road, which shares a compound with our affiliate gallery Chiaroscuro.