Beryl Cook
Anyone for a Whipping Embroidered Patch
£9
An embroidered patch featuring the work of Beryl Cook, exclusive to House of Voltaire
Dimensions
11 x 7 cm
Finishing
Embroidered patch
Courtesy the artist's estate
About The Artwork
This iron-on patch has been made exclusively for House of Voltaire to coincide with Studio Voltaire’s major exhibition Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland, bringing together the work of these two cultural icons for the very first time. Anyone for a Whipping was originally painted as a birthday present for the artist’s husband John, who had asked for “a great big nude in very naughty underwear”.
About Beryl Cook
Beryl Cook (1926–2008) was one of Britain’s best-loved artists. A self-taught painter, Cook is renowned for her exuberant style and explorations of English cultural identity and everyday life. Portrayed with defiance, her work can be understood as engaging with ideas around ‘female camp’, class and pleasure. Additionally, they can be contextualised within contemporary body positivity movements. Her larger-sized, usually jovial characters celebrate bigger bodies and inclusivity.
Cook's most celebrated and enduring images are of larger-than-life women carousing in nightclubs, eating in cafés or enjoying ribald hen parties. Though the women in Cook’s works embody comedic or bawdy qualities, they command the space of her paintings in complex, vivid and entirely believable portraits that draw from keenly observed social interactions.
Today, her works are held in the collections of the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, the Bristol City Museum of Art Gallery, and the Plymouth City Art Gallery, among others. The artist has received retrospective exhibitions at Baltic Centre of Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2007); Plymouth City Art Gallery, Plymouth (2017); and A.H.F.T.A.W, New York (2022).