Cora Cohen

Replace the Beloved

Cora Cohen (born 1943) is an American Abstract Painter. Cohen lives and works in Long Island City, New York. Her works are in many major public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Swedish State Art Council, The Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection, Berlin, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, and Yale University, New Haven.^[1]

Biography

Cora Cohen was born in New York City. She attended the High School of Music and Art (1957–60) and Bennington College (1960–64), where she studied with Paul Feeley and Lawrence Alloway. At Bennington she was influenced by the work of Frederick Kiesler, a guest lecturer and exhibitor, and Tony Smith, who taught there. Cohen was Artist in Residence in Painting at the University of Pennsylvania from 1969-70. She then returned to Bennington College as a graduate student (1970–1972) where she studied with Richard Haas and met sound artist Liz Phillips who introduced her to new music, in particular that of Pauline Oliveros and Steve Reich. In this work Cohen found reinforcement for using traditional art materials to create decompositional abstractions.

Cohen’s first solo exhibition at The Everson Museum of Artt in 1974 was initiated by James Harithas. She began exhibiting regularly in New York at the Max Hutchinson Gallery in 1976. Her 1984 exhibition at that gallery garnered critical attention. In The New York Times art critic Michael Brenson wrote, "The works are dense, brooding and yet elated. The turbulence of the paint not only looks but also feels like freedom."^[2] Cohen exhibited widely from the late eighties onward, in New York at the Holly Solomon Gallery and Wolff Gallery. In the early nineties she began exhibiting in Europe. From 1993 to 2007 she was represented by Jason McCoy Inc., New York. She continues to exhibit throughout the United States and Europe.

Cohen has been a Yaddo Foundation Fellow and the recipient of awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the NEA, the New York State Council for the Arts, the Gottlieb Foundation Award, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program, and recently, the Edward F. Albee Foundation.

Works

The relationships and affinities of her paintings with European Art informel (Wols, Jean Fautrier, Yves Klein) and the antecedent surrealist automatism of Andre Masson became more pronounced in Cohen’s work during the time she lived in Cologne in the nineties. Her work retained those allegiances. Her paintings are characterized by improvisatory and gestural procedures, “originary effacements … negations of nothing” (as described by Barry Schwabsky in “One Art”) simple, abstract forms; and asymmetrically arranged, but serene, compositions.^[3]

References

1. ^ http://www.coracohen.com Cora Cohen's official website
2. ^ Brenson, Michael, Cora Cohen at Max Hutchinson, The New York Times, March 1984
3. ^ Schwabsky, Barry, Cora Cohen: One Art , Text accompanying exhibition at Jason McCoy, September 2004

External links

• Cora Cohen's official website
• Waltemath, Joan, Cora Cohen: Michael Steinberg Gallery, The Brooklyn Rail, November 2008
• Riley, Jennifer, Cora Cohen: Come in a Little Closer at Michael Steinberg, artcritical.com, October 2008
• Brenson, Michael, Cora Cohen at Max Hutchinson, The New York Times, March 1984
• Maine, Stephen, Cora Cohen at Jason McCoy, Art in America, February 2005
• Buhmann, Stephanie, Cora Cohen at Jason McCoy, The Brooklyn Rail, November 2004

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Name	Cohen, Cora
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Date of birth	1943
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