Cork, Ireland.- The Crawford Art Gallery is pleased to present “Barrie Cooke” on view through January 14th 2012. This exhibition celebrates the work of Barrie Cooke’s immense career and prodigious achievements as he reaches his 80th Birthday this year. Karen Sweeney, Assistant Curator at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, curated the Barrie Cooke exhibition. After opening in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in June of this year, a selected group of works have been chosen to tour to the Crawford Art Gallery and then Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris in February 2012. The Barrie Cooke exhibition showcases works, from both private and institutional lenders, that span his entire career as an abstract expressionist painter. The exhibition explores Cooke’s continuous reference of the natural world; from the breathtaking paintings of an ancient Irish elk found in a bog and the bone boxes of the 1970s to the energetic paintings of rural Irish landscape and the famous nude portraits.