Dave Cooper

Dave Cooper (born in 1967, Shelburne, Canada) is a Canadian comic artist and painter, and a leading figure in the Surrealist Pop movement and the underground comics scene. A self-taught artist influenced by the work of Robert Crumb and Chester Brown, Dave Cooper began his career in the 1990s by creating underground comics for Fantagraphics Books in Seattle. In 1999, he published the first issue of his series Weasel, which won both the Ignatz Award and the Harvey Award in 2000. Each issue of this series consists of short chapters featuring eclectic projects. Encyclopedia Nonsensica appears alongside the vaudevillian episodes of Eddy Table and the much more realistic ones of Ripple: A Predilection for Tina. This latter project, reissued as an album by Fantagraphics, brought him widespread recognition.  

Dave Cooper’s career took a new turn with the success of his work as a painter, exhibiting alternately in galleries in Los Angeles and New York. The Angoulême International Comics Festival dedicated an exhibition to him in 2005. He then exhibited at the Musée de la Halle Saint-Pierre in Paris on several occasions as part of the HEY! exhibitions. He was also the subject of an exhibition at the Cité du Livre in Aix-en-Provence in 2017 for Les Rencontres du 9e Art (Ninth Art Encounters). In 2019, the publisher Cernunnos dedicated a 400-page monograph to his work titled Pillowy: the Art of Dave Cooper. The year 2024 marked his major return to comic art with the release of Dog Head #1” and his return to Paris with a new exhibition, Swollen in Paris, presented at the Daniel Maghen Gallery, featuring over 60 works: large-format oil paintings, original pages, and sculptures.