The Brooklyn Rail

Abstraction has always been difficult for me. Writing about abstraction is a particular challenge: how to put into words an encounter that resists being pinned down. Cora Cohen’s paintings confront this challenge directly: at my first encounter with A Decade: 2012–22, now on view at Greene Naftali, the canvases felt elusive; their gestures and veils of color did not immediately click into place, neither for their supposed importance in the canon nor their apparent beauty and stillness. To combat the blankness I felt, I turned to Linda Nochlin, whose words on Cohen brought the work closer to the light. In her reading, Nochlin emphasizes the intelligence and care underlying Cohen’s canvases: these are not random, uncared-for brushstrokes, but rather engage with the history of abstraction, from Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko to Helen Frankenthaler and beyond. They reflect a balance between the rigor of decision-making and allowing chance to guide the work, resulting in paintings whose layered marks, swaths of color, and subtle shifts in depth create a luminous complexity. The paintings demand an active viewer, someone willing to do what Nochlin instructs: to read the canvas “left to right, up and down, across the canvas, then front to back.”

The works in this exhibition come from Cohen’s last decade: the artist passed away at the age of seventy-nine in 2023. In one of her last paintings, Wind in Pines (2022), the precision and delicacy of her layered surfaces make Nochlin’s point tangible. Here, the interplay of materials—flashe, pigment, silkscreen ink, and watercolor—creates a lustrous depth on the linen canvas. Swathes of reddish-browns hover against cooler touches of lavender, army green, and pale blue. While there is no set place or scene, the painting conveys an almost meditative atmosphere, so grounded and real that it feels as if it might exist in its own unique environment. This work, alongside others in a similar palette, including Terrain Vague and Veronica’s Veil (both 2022), embodies Cohen’s balance of careful decision-making and openness to chance, and stands as a testament to the principles she held through the final years of her practice.

Not all of Cohen’s late works carry the ethereal quality that I am after. A few turn to a darker, more forceful register, emphasizing weight and materiality in an unsettling way. One large canvas, Curtain 8 Black (2013), features broad, sweeping impressions in shades of gray, each vertical stroke revealing the movement of Cohen’s arm. Nearby, Small Space (2012) sets a grey-blue ground against gestural marks of brown and yellow, the inherent tension within the brown strokes made visible by the artist’s hand laid bare across the surface of the canvas. While traces of natural or atmospheric imagery can emerge, the palette and textures remain rooted in the contemporary world: the weight of dark pigment, its tar-like quality, and the layered industrial surfaces insist on the presence of the modern, material world, rather than any abstract utopia.

For this final decade of Cora Cohen’s life and work, however, it feels preferable to dwell on the luminescent, layered works—the ones that conjure a sense of almost heavenly intensity, a space apart from the weight and harshness of the world.