Two Journeys: Bernard Cohen and Nathan Cohen

Flowers Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Bernard Cohen and Nathan Cohen, exhibiting together for the first time. The exhibition Two Journeys focuses on both father and son’s common quest for discovery through painting, where experience is translated through distinct forms and working processes.

Bernard Cohen’s paintings are recognised for their complex pictorial language, in which densely woven lattices of line, shape, pattern and colour are explored as a way of processing and recording lived experience. While Bernard Cohen’s paintings resist categorisation within any certain period or style, his work across six decades has been unified by formal attempts to discover and translate the full complexity of life, identity and the human condition.

His paintings take their starting point from simple underlying structural compositions, which divide the canvas into linear pathways and segments, such as crossed bars or architectural elevations. Superimposing intricate networks of lines, dots and planes of colour, with recurring figurative motifs such as doors, windows, aeroplanes, railway tracks and fragments of the human form, Bernard Cohen creates dizzying arrangements, within which an internal sense of order is revealed to the viewer gradually over time. Bernard Cohen says: “Two things preoccupy me; the painting I am making and painting in general (the subject of painting). In addressing these issues, each completed work is an attempt to understand a little of my world, as if for the first time. I cannot repeat what I have already found.”

Nathan Cohen’s paintings explore the nature of our relationships with phenomena in the world around us, and how this can be altered through images and physical interaction with space and visual form. He examines and reinvents the world we see through complex pictorial arrangements, using the picture plane as a surface upon which spatial reality can be rebuilt. The shaped paintings on view in this exhibition create illusions of space and depth, where planes may be perceived as simultaneously receding or projecting, allowing the viewer to journey both around and through the work.

Over the years, Nathan Cohen has worked using a range of media and technologies to engage with different aspects of perception and experience. He says: “How we encounter the world is essentially a very personal act and we do this in a way that is both knowing (based on prior experience) and questioning (open to new experience). In choosing to make an artwork I am seeking to explore both of these perspectives and in doing so one of the big challenges is how to make an illusion of space appear real and to find a way to make spatially comprehendible what is in essence an invention.”

This exhibition coincides with the Tate Spotlight Display: Bernard Cohen at Tate Britain, currently on view until 3 June 2018.