NYAB Event - Cora Cohen "Come in a Little Closer"

Cora Cohen "Come in a Little Closer"

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At Michael Steinberg Fine Art
Media: Painting

Michael Steinberg Fine Art presents Come in a Little Closer, recent paintings by Cora Cohen. Known as an artist who is deeply committed to an investigation of the language of painting, her work resists singular classification.

Cohen’s painting draws from a myriad of art historical and contemporary sources. American Modernists Marsden Hartley and Albert Pinkham Ryder are invoked through a mysterious richness of presence. The gnarled materiality of Art Informel practiced by Jean Fautrier and Wols, as well as the automatism of Surrealist André Masson, inform Cohen’s approach.

The paintings exhibited at Michael Steinberg Fine Art intensify the dialogue between improvisational forms and moments of interruption, between the relationship of materiality to concept. Painted gestures are purposefully truncated by stoppages often achieved through the adhesion of paper and tape to linen and their subsequent removal. The overall surface effect recalls the erosion patterns of the contemporary urban landscape, the duality of decay and opulence that are the marks of Chelsea, where the artist has recently maintained a studio. Cohen’s paintings also evoke terrestrial cycles. Describing her most recent body of work, she writes, “My interest in absence, in what has disappeared, become intangible, yet continues to resonate, finds its material counterpart in my involvement with the physical world of paint and painting.” This informed sensitivity to the entropic laws of nature puts Cohen in line with Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson, artists seemingly quite diverse from her own practice.

[Image: Cora Cohen "White" (2008) acrylic, Flashe, oil on drop cloth 33 x 45 in.]