May 31 to July 10, 2016
8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City (212) 673-6466

Driving on winding country roads one often sees the cautionary yet poetic sounding sign “Bridge Freezes Before the Road”. You know to check your speed, pay attention to the surface and be warned for vehicles to spontaneously spin out of control on black ice or hidden pockets of slush in otherwise apparently normal circumstances. As a show title, “Bridge Freezes Before the Road” alerts us to slippery conditions and challenging possibilities of Cora Cohen’s paper surface.

Cohen is a formidable abstract painter who is known for deploying several different mediums and approaches within a single work. Recent bodies of work strive to make the act of perceiving or making the major preoccupation of the work. There are hints of her historical influences, whether Jean Fautrier, Henri Michaux, Wols, art brut, art informel, New York School painting or Far Eastern art, to name a few, but her subjects, choice of materials and themes come from her own reserves.

This show, which was curated by Karen Wilkin, is a perfect opportunity to glimpse at how the artist might see drawings as they are being made in her studio, as, unframed, they are informally pinned up and hung in groups that may or may not relate to a larger painting or signal a nascent theme. The show comprises 27 works from the last decade made on synthetic and natural papers, in sizes ranging from 9 by 12 to 22 by 30 inches with titles such as “Hybrid Indexical Adventure Series” or named according to dates in action or completion. The titles are unambiguous despite the somewhat generic dating. They underscore, as does the title of the exhibition that the artist works from her experiences of first sight, combined with a very wide range of influences that she draws away from as the works themselves develop. I list the materials: graphite, acrylic gesso, acrylic medium, watercolor, crayon, colored pencil, pastel, Flashe, archival ink-jet, wood-veneer, pigment – not because the amount of them is so extraordinary by today’s standards, but because of how well she knows them and in turn coaxes freshness out of them in drawings of delightfully unexpected combinations and poetic compositions.

In 08-15, (2015) fragmented sinewy crayon lines meander over a richly developed whitish surface. Traces of lines can be found below areas of added colors of minty green, blue, yellow and coral. At a glance an image of a figure in a squatting position with a large right foot at the bottom of the page might be found but as your eye slows and the upper half of the page is explored, now an aerial view of land in which solid forms begin to appear as pattern. Maps, seasons, climate changes and such seem to be collecting on the page. Washes of grey have the effect of toning down clacking yellows, while dry pastel seems to be blanketing the lower portion. Something that is very powerful in this particular work is the way it can make us feel engaged in discovery as we look. The surprise of seeing entire worlds encircled below certain areas with marks and textural shifts keep us searching for more. It is as if the sounds of a full orchestra are made by just a clutch of instruments. And as in a concert hall, the worlds one viewer finds won’t necessarily correspond to the discoveries of another.

In 015-11, (2011) veils of delicately hued liquid cover much of the off-square format. Brushstrokes sink into the creamy paper: successive layers lighten some areas while in other places pigments bleed and pool to make natural edges for new shapes. Drips and splatters become attributes or relationships rather than signifiers of process because in Cohen’s work, everything gets worked into the image. A big swath of a cloudy medium collects and dries in the lower left half of the page forming crystalline shapes like those found on freezing windows. Four or five biomorphic forms, hovering atop it all, are significantly more densely colored than the environment they occupy. Their edges are circumnavigated by colored pencil and graphite in repeated routes that frequently slip away from the forms they describe, to instead create areas that invite the viewer to mentally fill them in. There is a smoldering awareness that as these floating things resolve into one form or object then like a cloud they can becomes another. It is something of this world, with its allusions to atmosphere, lichen, algae, crystalline forms and geological peaks and something of an altogether alien plane, a hybrid existence.

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This year’s fellowship awards from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation were presented to a total of 24 artists working in the field of Fine Arts; 14 artists in the category of Film-Video; 11 in Photography. The Fine Arts fellows include seven diverse painters, all women: Leigh Behnke, Cora Cohen, Harriet Korman, Carrie Moyer, Ann Pibal, Susan Wanklyn, and Elena Sisto. Cohen and Korman have been active since the 1960s. Cohen, known for her large-scale, dense and washy, mixed-media oil paintings, also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award in 2012. The Responsibility of Forms, an exhibition of her new paintings was recently at Guided By Invoices in New York, reviewed in these pages by David Rhodes.  Sisto, a long-time teacher at the School of Visual Arts, opens an exhibition of new work on April 25, titled Between Silver Light and Orange Shadow, at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, her first show with that gallery.  She describes her recent paintings as “centering around the artist’s experience of being in the studio, and the passage into adulthood of young women artists.”

Philip Kennicott chief art critic for The Washington Post, has received the Pulitzer Prize in the category of criticism this year for two long-format reviews of exhibitions, and one personal essay, all written in 2012. The three highlighted articles are: a critical analysis of the photography of Taryn Simon at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, a review of an exhibition at the National Building Museum devoted to the architect Kevin Roche, and an essay, titled “What Are We Losing in the Web’s Images of Suffering and Schadenfreude?” that examines our relationship to the over-abundance of disturbing and grotesque imagery found online and in-print. Kennicott, a finalist for last year’s Pulitzer, has been a critic for the Post since 1999.

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February 15 to March 30, 2013
558 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City,  917.226.3851

The title of Cora Cohen’s first exhibition at this relatively new gallery, The Responsibility of Forms, is taken from Roland Barthes late collection of critical essays on music, art and representation, written mostly during the 1970s, and first translated into English in 1991. Terry Eagleton described these essays as being preoccupied with “…those stray material fragments which elude the embrace of the sign, those gestures or signs which even the most elaborate semiology must fail to formalize. It is to move from text to texture.” This description is very apposite to Cohen’s approach to painting, in which she seeks to allow space for both mind and body, material and meaning, the semiotic and somatic, a common and indistinct border.

Consequently Cohen’s paintings are non-iconographic, by which I mean that they are not concerned with fixing an image for the purpose of exegesis. The visible world that surrounds us and from which of course we are not in anyway separate, is part of the paintings as a specific material quality such as shimmer, instability, materiality. Analogs to things in the world– a tree, some water – are not banished but left latent, like a word on the tip of your tongue, there and present, but not definable.

There are seven paintings in the show.  Powdered earth pigments (the ground of the paintings consisting often of the ground from beneath our feet) and graphite are combined with medium and applied in layers, sometimes as a fluid wash and at other times as dry brushed marks. The paint layers are thin and seem to both emit and trap light, recalling Helmut Federle’s paintings, with which Cohen also shares the use of earth colors. Graphite is preferred to black for its subtle range and its responsiveness to light – the shimmer it produces imparting a sense of instability.  This instability means that the viewer cannot ‘catch’ the painting from any particular viewpoint, the painting changing as the angle, incidence of light and position of the viewer changes.

Take Curtain8 Black, (2013), at 69 by 91 inches the largest painting in the exhibition: flashe, graphite and pigment are used on linen to achieve virtuosic yet unshowy gradations and accumulations of paint in thin layers that leave traces and marks from the artists process.  The orientation is horizontal and the traces vertical, implying a left/right movement. Drawing is always present in this process and is inseparable from the notion of painting, much as it is in a Joan Mitchell or a Franz Kline painting, and Cohen is without doubt at  the same level of subtlety, particularity and independence as these artists. In Small Drop Cloth Drawing 2013 this linear element, as could be expected from the title, is more explicit, but just as rooted in the act of using paint. That the paintings here recall and reference the achievements of Ab Ex is no problem.

Cohen uses combinations of gel and medium to gain a materiality for the paintings as opposed to using thick paint, and this allows the support — a natural linen — to remain visible as texture and color. Gesso is added when more absorbency and light are desired from the support. The gel can act to form shape and surface alike, in part determining whether the support comes to act as source to draw from or something to work against. In the gallery’s back room – if the door is closed, ask to see it – Curtain7, (2013) appears to have gel fingered across the entire surface in such a way that color – when applied in transparent glazes — establishes ambiguous spatiality.

Dirty/clean painting is a term Cohen uses without wanting to define the term – it’s simply a question to ask, nothing to do with hygiene yet everything to do with being embodied.  Dirty painting embraces this, clean distances it and puts a gloss on the world – something this artist clearly has no intention of doing.

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