The Final Years

During the pandemic and the social upheavals of 2020, Cohen worked largely alone in her living room, returning to unfinished paintings and drawings from earlier decades. The works made in the spring of 2020 carry an urgency shaped by the awareness that life is not infinite. Her final lifetime exhibition, Cora Cohen: Works from the 1980s, was held at Morgan Presents from September 15 to October 18, 2022. Critical attention included a review from Barry Schwabsky that situated her among a generation of women painters who extended the legacy of Abstract Expressionism on their own terms, and claimed that her mature 1980 canvases closed a long-held “missing gap” between the women of the New York School and the gestural painters who emerged after 2000. He concluded, “Cohen’s determination to evade stylistic consistency has made her one of the most underrated painters in New York.”

From statements by Cora Cohen on her website (2022)

“The pandemic of 2020 affected my life in general, and my work as an artist in particular. Support for Black Lives Matter grew and became increasingly diverse, yet police killings of Black people continued unchecked. Peaceful demonstrations were increasingly met with hostility and overt violence, and I became even more alienated from American culture, particularly the legal system.”

“My main studio helper left New York in the spring, and when the pandemic hit hardest, I asked the others to stay home. I began doing the preparation myself, one at a time, feeling real pressure to make something beautiful in the face of the criminally unnecessary deaths and degradation of many. In recent years, I would get five or six canvases stretched and primed by helpers in advance. Not having to do that myself seemed like a good idea – things go faster that way and while I wanted to slow down my application of paint, I wanted to keep producing paintings.”

“Doing the preparation was settling, and it was a way of connecting to the future painting. I wanted to return to my own beginnings as a painter—my love of making things with my hands. So I started making work in my living room, revisiting small paintings and drawings from various periods of my life that I had left unfinished and then abandoned. The works I made in the spring of 2020 had that sense of urgency. Because I began them at different periods, I saw them as bridges between past and present, between life and death, between life and the possibility of an afterlife, and between the past and a radically uncertain future. In some of them I silkscreened parts onto the linen, then washed off the ink while it was wet. It’s not as if there are no traces or signs of the hand on them, but they still look like they were brought in from outer space.”

“I have continued working on paintings one at a time, often printing the basic structure of earlier works onto primed linen, then working back into that printed armature directly, introducing conflicting scenarios. I do have a notion of what I want my current work to be, how I want it to present itself. I want to make a painting that is non-finite, ambiguous but at the same time rather serious and non-ironic, a painting one might not notice as a painting. One might walk by it as one does a wall or an unremarkable tree, a method of turning failure into a compelling act. I approach each day with an anything can happen mentality. Usually, I have a rough idea or a stance or an attitude that I want my painting to take, or a position that I want my work to have.”

RELATED DOCUMENTS

Barry Schwabsky, “Cora Cohen,” Artforum International, January, 2023

Alfred MacAdam, “Cora Cohen: Works from the 1980's,” The Brooklyn Rail, October 2022

Michael Brennan, “Cora Cohen’s thoroughbred abstraction,“Two Coats of Paint, September 22, 2022

Morgan Aguiar-Lucander, “Cora Cohen: Works from the 1980's”, catalog essay (Morgan Presents, 2022)