From the 1970s until her death in 2023, CORA COHEN widened the net of gestural abstraction’s possibilities. Her muscular and poetic works belong to that formidable lineage yet drew strength from their own reserves, keeping the roster of dynamic marks vital and relevant despite critical reports of their demise. A highly regarded painter’s painter who lived and worked between New York and Cologne, Cohen brought a tactile grit to her intense and varied art. Elemental colors are deposited in thinned veils or rough impasto that juts off the surface—shifts in depth that she heightened with ink, charcoal, pigments, or watercolor that vie for space with the paint. For Linda Nochlin, the lure of Cohen’s touch could “overwhelm the critical faculties until you realize how much intelligence has gone into the construction of these works: how much knowledge of and engagement with the history of abstraction itself, from its beginnings through Pollock and Rothko and Frankenthaler to the present; how much decision-making about where to let chance have its way, where to impose the sanctions of aesthetic will.” That push-pull of conflicting impulses defined Cohen’s approach, treating painting as a theater of productive dissent: her works confront gravity with weightlessness, rigor with intuition, order with disarray, and natural cues with industrial materials of a distinctly urban cast. Rather than forcing a tidy synthesis, Cohen let those polarities stand: “it’s a relief,” she once remarked, “when the hold of binary thinking lifts in favor of fluid operations.”

Born in New York City in 1943, Cohen studied painting at Bennington College in Vermont, where her instructors included Lawrence Alloway and Paul Feeley. Her extensive exhibition history began with a solo presentation at the Everson Museum in Syracuse in 1974. She showed regularly in New York galleries—including Wolff, Holly Solomon, and Jason McCoy—and solo institutional exhibitions have been held at Omaha’s Joslyn Museum of Art and the Museum Insel Hombroich in Neuss, Germany, among others.