Michael Steinberg Fine Art is pleased to present 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.

Time, a topic not usually discussed in relation to painting, becomes a key element to
understanding Cohen’s artistic practice. Critic Stephen Maine commented on this
fundamental aspect made visible when experiencing her work, “In their unremitting
materiality, Cohen’s surfaces ensure that a process of visual decoding unfolds
perpetually.” The paintings reveal their nature slowly, like a developing conversation
between two strangers, the more one gives to them the more one takes away.