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.