Bernard cohen artist biography

Bernard Cohen is a distinguished British painter (and aficionado of the American Southwest). His abstract paintings use pictorial and schematic images of jet planes, animal tracks, dinner place settings and billboards to create an exhilarating dance of form eller gestalt and texture across the picture plane. From the avant-garde of the 1960’s to the diverse and divisive 2000’s Cohen has evoked the chaos, the playfulness and the expansiveness of our times.

Bernard Cohen and Bud Shark began a fruitful print relationship in New Mexico in 1970. They have worked together over the years to create many fabulous bodies of work, including the series “Six Images for J.” in 1976, the “Colorado” prints in 1999, and the recent Untitled lithograph completed in 2005. Cohen’s technique of layering meticulously hand-cut stencils, rotation of images, and progressive addition of color is uniquely suitable to the printmaking process.

Bernard Cohen has exhibited his work widely in England, Euro

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Bernard Cohen is a British painter, regarded as one of the leading abstract artists of his time.

 

Cohen discovered painting at the Walthamstow School of Art, going on to study at Central Saint Martins in London between 1950 and 1951 and the Slade School of Art 1951-1954, where he was deeply influenced by William Coldstream. In 1957 Cohen received the Boise Traveling Scholarship and, together with the French Government Scholarship awarded to him in 1954, he was able to travel and work in France, Spain and Italy.

 

Following various teaching positions throughout the 60s and 70s at Ealing School of Art, the Slade, Chelsea College of Art and Design, the Royal College of Art and the University of New Mexico; in 1988 he was appointed Professor and Director of the Slade School of Art, UCL, a position held until 2000. He was part of The Situation Group, featuring in their group portrait by Sylvia Sleigh (1961; NPG 6817) which is on display at the National

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Born in London, where he lives and works, Bernard Cohen studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1951 to 1954. In 1988, he was appointed as a Professor and Director of the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London. Cohen's work came to prominence during the 1960s and has since been exhibited extensively. Ten of Cohen's paintings are in the collection of the Tate.

 

Public exhibitions have included a retrospective in 1972 at London's Hayward Gallery, which then toured to Newcastle and Leeds; Artist in Focus, Six Paintings from the Tate Gallery Collection in 1995 at London's Tate Gallery; Stroll on! Aspects of British Abstract Art in the Sixties in 2006 at Geneva's Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain; and Abstraction and the Human Figure at CAM's British Art Collection in 2010 at Lisbon's Fondação Calouste Gulbenkian. In 2018, Cohen's work was exhibited as a Spotlight exhibition at Tate Britain. In 2018 he