Nigel Cooke (born 1973, Manchester) is one of Britain's most critically acclaimed contemporary painters, whose work sits in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Tate, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He studied Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, and holds a PhD in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Cooke came to international attention with a solo exhibition at Tate Britain in 2004 and is now represented by Pace Gallery in New York and London. His paintings combine realism with abstraction — layered canvases that conjure scenes of atmospheric decay, where intricately rendered debris gives way to airy, near-abstract backgrounds of luminous colour. Over time his work has grown increasingly diffuse, his most recent paintings composed of dense gestural brushstrokes on raw linen, verging toward pure abstraction.

Living and working in Kent, Cooke has exhibited globally from New York and Hong Kong to Cape Town and Vienna, establishing himself as a defining voice in British painting of his generation.