Lives and works in New York, NY
Jake Couri’s work approaches painting as a site where memory, writing, and emotion can take form. His recent canvases are built through layers of brushwork, subtle figuration, and recurring motifs that hold the residue of lived experience. These images emerge from a process that moves fluidly between journaling, visual research, and material experimentation, allowing fragments of text and thought to become embedded in the physical surface of paint.
Trained in sculpture and CGI, Couri carries a sensitivity to space, weight, and atmosphere into his paintings. The compositional strategies he developed in fabricating objects and constructing digital avatars now inform how he shapes images on canvas, treating each work as both a construction and an excavation. This interplay between building and uncovering mirrors the way personal history, memory, and unresolved thought surface through the act of painting.
At the core of his practice is an inquiry into how symbols and gestures hold meaning beyond words. The figures and forms that recur across his work function less as narratives than as touchstones; marks that echo, return, and shift with time. In this way, Couri’s paintings become containers for transformation, reflecting the tension between permanence and impermanence, material presence and fleeting sensation.