New York painter Cora Cohen has died at the age of seventy-nine. Born in New York in 1943, Cohen earned BA and MA degrees from Bennington College in Vermont, where her teachers included painter Paul Feeley and critic and curator Lawrence Alloway. Beginning with an exhibition at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York, in 1974 at the invitation of James Harithas, Cohen had a long exhibition history, but it stuck – as Barry Schwabsky pointed out in a recent review of an exhibition of Cohen’s work from the 1980s – “one of New York’s most underrated painters”. However, she had passionate admirers. Anne M. Wagner, for example, quoted Cohen (along with Charline von Heyl) as one of Helen Frankenthaler’s reported successors as “‘painting artists’ as well as abstractionists” who “discover” each painting as it is made. In their work, antimechanics is a resolute position, an approach to painting, and the results are crucial for the future of abstraction, the afterlife to come.
Cohen’s enduring concern was how abstract painting could connect to the lived world; in this sense, it was trying to develop a position outside of formalism. Perhaps that is why she was drawn to the example of Joan Mitchell, with whom she spent time in Vétheuil, France. From “the consideration of a painting as an autonomous object, often outside of any social system”, Cohen said fellow painter Sam Jablon, “I refute this obliquely and explicitly.” Sometimes this rebuttal might involve the use of image fragments such as views of the inside of the body on exposed x-ray film she painted on, but more often Cohen’s questioning of the self-enclosure of art took on more oblique forms. His paintings confront order with disorder, structure with formlessness, artistic will (as in the gesture of command dear to the abstract expressionists) with ungovernable flow and entropy. Thanks to the unpredictable placement of substances on the surfaces of his works, some of his paintings have the disconcerting property of being impossible to fix in memory, and so one wonders whether, like people, they have changed since the last time. .
After his 1974 exhibition at the Everson, Cohen exhibited regularly in New York galleries, including Max Hutchinson, Wolff, Holly Solomon, A/C Project Room and Jason McCoy, and his museum exhibitions included solo outings at Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha. , and Insel Hombroich Museum, Neuss, Germany. Cohen’s recent solo exhibitions include those at the New York Studio School Gallery in 2016 and Morgan Presents, also in New York, in 2022.
