Cockrill, Maurice
Maurice Cockrill was born in Hartlepool near Durham in the north of England in 1936. He spent his early years in Wales and the Midlands and was a late starter in art by his admission. He began his full-time art course at Wrexham School of Art in 1960 and studied fine art at the University of Reading in 1961-1964. After graduation, Maurice moved to Liverpool where he taught at St Helen’s School of Art from 1964 to 1966 and at the Faculty of Art of Liverpool Polytechnic from 1967 to 1980.
Although Cockrill participated in his first group exhibition Art in the City at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1967 he destroyed everything he had painted up to 1968 and started all over again. His photorealistic period began in 1970 and he had his first major solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1971.
Apart from being a lecturer Maurice worked on several commissions from Arts Council, painted and exhibited in Liverpool extensively and travelled to Spain, Holland, Belgium, Germany and Italy in the 1970s. He also had a four-month study trip to America in 1978 and moved to London in 1982.
By then Cockrill had wilfully overturned his earlier photorealistic style and fully embraced the new one gradually moving away from figuration to abstraction. With the human body completely disappearing from his paintings his landscapes evocated nature and the countryside from the beginning of 1990s. His friendship with Ian McKeever (born 1946) and Anish Kapoor (born 1954), both of whom were Liverpool’s first artists-in-residence in 1980-81 and 1981-82 respectively, inspired Maurice’s bold move towards new expression akin to neo-Expressionism expounded by Georg Baselitz (born 1938) and Anselm Kiefer (born 1945) in Germany and Frank Auerbach (born 1931) in the UK.
Cockrill began teaching at St Martin’s School of Art in London in 1984 and had a one-man show Heroes and Victims at Kunstmuseum in Dusseldorf in 1985. From 1985 to 1988 he was a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art and the Central School of Art. Maurice was nominated for the Jerwood Prize in 1994 and was the Artist in Residence at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales in Australia in 1995 when he also had a major retrospective at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.
He became a visiting tutor at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1995-1998 and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1999. Cockrill was a visiting artist at Vermont Studio Centre, the USA in 2002 and 2004 and was elected the Keeper of the Royal Academy of Arts and Head of the Royal Academy Schools in 2004. He was made an Honorary Member of Royal West of England Academy in 2005 and the President of the Royal Cambrian Academy and Professor of Contemporary Fine Art in Liverpool John Moores University in 2006. Cockrill became an Honorary Member of Royal Watercolour Society and a Guest Professor, Xi’an Academy of Fine Art, China in 2007.
His works are present in many distinguished public collections including Arts Kunstmuseum in Düsseldorf, Germany, Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo, Polanco, Mexico, the British Museum, Arts Council of Great Britain and Welsh Arts Council, Contemporary Art Society and Royal Academy in London, Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and Contemporary Art Society for Wales.
