Christopher Cook was born in North Yorkshire, England, and studied English Literature and Fine Art at the University of Exeter, UK.
He took an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, during which time he won the Camden Annual Open exhibition, and was given his first major solo show at Camden Arts Centre the following year.
Following the RCA, he spent three years in Bologna as Italian Government scholar, and was included in the exhibitions Eros in Albion at the Casa Masaccio and From Bacon to Now at the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Between 1991-94 he was Guest Artist at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt, Germany, Visiting Fellow to the Ruskin School, University of Oxford, and Distinguished Visiting Artist to CalState University Long Beach, where he exhibited in the UK/LA festival. In the same year, he represented the UK at the Cagnes Painting Biennale, France and also in the European Union exhibition in Bangkok.
In the mid-nineties, three extended visits to India produced two sequences of sand drawings made by the river Ganges in Varanasi, which led to a rethink of his work, and from which his monochrome graphite process emerged whilst working in a studio in Porthleven, Cornwall. An early graphite was a prizewinner at John Moores XXI, and an exhibition of his early graphite works toured to the Netherlands and Germany, ending at the Heidelberger Kunstverein.
In 1998, Cook was appointed Reader in Painting at the University of Plymouth. Following publication of his selected poems For and Against Nature in 2000, he travelled on a AHRC award to work at Bundanon Trust Australia, and later that year began a two-year Arts Council England residency at Eden Project, Cornwall (UK), where some of the larger graphite works relating to genetics and self-organising systems began, along with material for his artist's book a thoroughbred golden calf. These works were later exhibited at the Ferens Museum Hull and the Towner Gallery Eastbourne.
A major survey show of his monochrome work, supported by the British Council, toured three venues in the USA in 2004, including the first of regular solo shows with Mary Ryan gallery and Ryan Lee gallery New York. An AHRC/Daiwa funded residency accompanied his solo show at Yokohama Museum of Art in 2005, the exhibition transferring to Today Art Museum Beijing the following year. Previously coincidental connections to Eastern aesthetics and visual traditions became more developed following this period.
In 2012 he was awarded a Bogliasco Foundation Scholarship (Italy) where he made a series of smaller improvised landscapes provoked by Eastern notational techniques, later exhibited at Art First London, where they were accompanied by a new publication Stanzas after Hokusai.
In 2016 a series of fifty images taking the 17th Dutch Still Life tradition as starting point began. One of the first exhibited was awarded the Valeria Sykes first prize at the New Light Biennale, which opened at Bowes Museum, Co. Durham in 2017. Images from the series also won the Sunny Art prize, and the Jackson’s Art prize (for Still Life). The culmination of the series was inclusion in the 2019 exhibition, Making a Masterpiece at York Art Gallery, a Flemish and Dutch survey show which interspersed ten graphite works with old master paintings, including five newly commissioned works that directly referenced Dutch paintings held in York’s own collection. All ten works were then included in solo shows in Manchester and London.
From 2022-23 Cook was Visiting Professor to NTNU Taipei, and also lectured in several other universities in Taiwan. A solo show of work he produced there was held at Chini Gallery, Taipei in 2024, and also shown in Taipei Art Fair.
Forthcoming exhibitions include John Moores Liverpool, Mary Ryan Gallery New York, and Frestonian Gallery, London.