Opening Season: Abstraction and Landscape Part III: Cora Cohen at Greene Naftali

Small Space, 2012, oil on linen, 29 x 32 inches

The first painting in this knockout decade survey Cora Cohen: A Decade: 2012-22 at Greene Naftali.

She must have used a marble dust or water absorbent gesso, because the surface was so matte the blue shape looked collaged as if the paint and surface were one. Flat and matte to an infinite degree, one I would have liked to achieve in oils but never could.

If I Weren't, 2012, oil on linen, 67 x 69 inches. 

This relates to Curtain 8 Black, 2013, Flashe, graphite, and pigment on linen, 69 x 9 inches (on gallery website linked above). It also overlaps in Louise Fishman's vertical strokes in the late work, with the hint of a grid, but over time each artist's unique mark becomes more distinct.  When I knew Cohen in the 1990s, her paintings were dark, impasto, and dense with glitter. Whether heavy oil or watercolor, she was always innovating, out in front.

Terrain Vague, 2022, Flashe and watercolor on linen, 40 x 58 inches

Was this named after Mira Schor's brilliant essay Figure/Ground in her groundbreaking book Wet (1997)?

Detail of Terrain Vague. The surface almost like pumice, absorbing the watercolor instantly.

Portrait of an Artist, 2022, Flashe and watercolor on linen, 59 x 39 inches

Where painting and drawing truly fuse. Two Coats of Paint's Cora Cohen obituary quotes her saying, “I have continued working on paintings one at a time, often printing the basic structure of earlier works onto primed linen, then working back into that printed armature directly, introducing conflicting scenarios. I do have a notion of what I want my current work to be, how I want it to present itself. I want to make a painting that is non-finite, ambiguous but at the same time rather serious and non-ironic, a painting one might not notice as a painting. One might walk by it as one does a wall or an unremarkable tree, a method of turning failure into a compelling act.” –Cora Cohen, 2022, NYC"

DETAIL

We close with the ethereal Veronica's Veil, 2022, acrylic, colored pencil, Flashe, and watercolor on cotton duck, 61 x 59 inches, and some details. It's hard to write words about this painting, which foresees (in my experience) the desire to pour and paint transparently together. 

 

Opening Season: Abstraction and Landscape Part II: Friedel Dzubas at Lincoln Glenn

Juicy, boisterous paint from Friedel Dzubas in The Slow Unfolding: Friedel Dzubas' Final Abstractions, through November 8th at Lincoln Glenn. Link here: https://www.lincolnglenn.com/exhibitions/38-the-slow-unfolding-friedel-dzubas-final-abstractions/works/

Some details of the prior painting--beautiful opaques and transparents together

Also hardened chips of paint among the exciting brushed areas. 

Amidst the maelstrom one uncovers vapor...

Two beauties as well as pulp paper works (that are painted on).

The exhibition covers a decade, similar to Cora Cohen's survey at Greene Naftali, here, 1980-1989.

I believe this is 1983, similar to his early studio-mate Frankenthaler--each harvesting a language for abstraction.

 

Opening Season: Abstraction and Landscape Part I: Cynthia Lin at Satchel Projects

StoneRoots 5770 InvBluGr, 2025, 60 x 48 inches, in Cynthia Lin's solo exhibition Strange Twin at Satchel Projects. For accurate color and press release visit https://www.satchelprojects.com/cynthia-lin

StoneRoots 5770 InvBluGr is a photographed landscape turned vertically. The upturned shoreline mirrors human bodies reflected in cultural and political shifts, both stolid and dissolving. Lin, Taiwanese-born and a long-time New York resident, instinctively recognizes translation's displacements. Her work encompasses multiple dislocations, from landscape to climate change, that increasingly turns things sideways.

BoulderStoneRoot5777PinkAquaShimmer, 2025, 54 x 50 inches

Acrylic has been swapped for oil in the new work, yet the soft repetitive strokes in charcoal and acrylic in earlier work now stacks small, linear brushstrokes into dense networks of texture. Color is painted with simultaneous contrast, forming volumetric bodies that dissipate into marks.

Overturned5717 InvPinkIceBlue, 2025, oil on panel, 20 x 24 inches

A landscape assembled from the many photos Lin takes when kayaking. Here, a wing-like form flays open, overturning Soutine's carcass of beef into reposing body, shell, or shroud. The form is both solid and ephemeral, an open book for future paintings.

StoneRoots5770 InvTurqBl, 2024, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches

Channeling Ingre's portrait of Monsieur Bertin as a supplicant, branch hands reach out from the painting beneath a divided head. Staring into the paint yields odd associations, including Viennese painter Klimt and Dagobert Peche in the way patterns inflate and tumble from the body. Yet it remains a landscape turned on its side.

BoneBranch5007, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 11 inches

As the first chronological painting, this painting becomes a presiding spirit and presents a compression returned to in most recent work. The bucolic scene of a river and wood, re-envisioned as a ganglia of internal organs, represents the ease with which experience is abstracted into code, yielding new images that amplify shared experience. At the same time, these are distinctly paintings, fully rendered in oil. For one generation, they represent disintegration and for another, construction.