On a rainy night in Chelsea in 2009 I opened a solo show called Sentiment and Seduction.  While I was talking to gallery visitors a woman approached me in an vivid canary yellow coat — very unlike the uniformly black coats of a typical New York opening crowd.
She said, “Hi. My name is Laura. I grew up outside of Washington D.C. in Maryland in the 1960s and early 70s. My mother worked for the CIA. I need to talk to you. You understand.”
Surprised, I said, “My mother worked for the CIA!”
She said, “I know. I can tell.”
I was startled and asked her, “How can you tell?”
She said, “Your work screams it.”  And then she added. “But there is one other thing — I was raised Catholic.”
I said. “Exactly. I was raised Catholic too.”
She looked around the room at my paintings on display.  “I don’t see it.”
I said, “You have to see the rest of my work.”

Mike Cockrill has been making conceptually engaged, socially challenging work since he first began showing in Brooklyn and the East Village in the early 1980s.  Cockrill grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC in the late 50s and early 60s, with a father who began his career at the Pentagon and a mother who later worked for the CIA. He has a particular affinity for the pop-culture images of postwar America and their darker subtexts.   Classically trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Cockrill employs a deep understanding of visual idioms that he deftly twists, literally and conceptually. Cockrill’s art is ever evolving, always playing the unnerving against the sublime. He lives and works in Brooklyn, and has maintained a studio in the Old American Can Factory since 1979.

For inquiries, please email: mockrill@aol.com