EARTH SLIPPED AND HEAVEN SPILLED

JEANE COHEN AT SLAG GALLERY

EARTH SLIPPED AND HEAVEN SPILLED

Slag Gallery presents Jeane Cohen’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery entitled Earth Slipped and Heaven Spilled. The fourteen paintings in the exhibition are abstracted delineations of observed nature whether human, wildlife or media, painted this past summer while Cohen was in the solitude of Maine.

Michelle Grabner, noted artist, writer and curator, has written in the past on Cohen’s paintings as “commingling of action, intellect, and genre reinforce the lived experiences of perception and translation; evoking the principles of attention and occupation over article and guile.”

Cohen’s Fires embodies all Grabner wrote – the painting brings our collective idea of what a wildfire is together with her act of observation in complex dexterity through an immediacy rendered by gestural composition. Relating painterly innovation with a moment in time, Fires is assured of its location between representation and abstraction, asserting itself as an ontological inquiry. Fires is anchored by the fire depicted in the bottom right of the canvas in rich reds and dark browns while in the top left corner the painting is somewhat contained by a smoky grayish night sky.

The rest of the painting is enmeshed in a conflagration of pigment in bold and vibrant colors by choreographed marks, lines, scrubs, sweeps, daubs, veils, smudges, and retractions.

Cohen’s intuitive process is based upon her lived experiences and not in clean cut absolutes. She says that this body of work addresses “… what we cannot understand but may seem familiar or what may be difficult to grasp. This challenge of holding fast is why my works look like they are emerging, coming together, forming recognizable moments, falling and breaking, all at the same time.” That Cohen’s marks and gestures are alive with forces both intimate and infinite that are not easily held without close attention.

Heavens Spilling Out is just that, the painting is spilling itself out across the canvas. It reveals everything to the viewer – delicate blues and browns with a touch of red umber, lingering and boundless brushstrokes barely touching the surface while drips and streams of pigment spill. In response to the subtle dynamics the viewer shares in the lived experiences with the painting as well as Cohen herself.

SLAG GALLERY
New York, USA

Slag Gallery is committed to present work by emerging artists and to support and sustainably nourish their careers. With this at its core, the gallery’s efforts concentrate on local and international exposure of works by artists in its roster, by providing the cultural exchange with art institutions and organizations, publishing catalogs, collaborating with other galleries, and participating in Art Fairs.

The artists of Slag Gallery have been included in a number of internationally recognized exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale (2001), the Istanbul Biennale (2011), Prague Biennial (2011), along with exhibitions at museums and institutions such as PS1 in New York; The Drawing Center, NY; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Marina Abramović Institute, San Francisco; Kunsthalle Budapest (Mucsarnok); MODEM Modern and Contemporary Art Center, Debrecen; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; MKM Museum Kuppersmühle, Duisburg; Kultur Fabrik, Luxembourg; Brukental Museum, Sibiu; The Museum of New Art, Detroit; NJMoCA; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; Queens Museum of Art, NY; Birmingham Museum of Art: Boulder MoCA; the Islip Museum of Art, NY; Marfa Contemporary, TX; Kunsthaus Worms, GE; Kunstverein Viernheim, GE, Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; MARe, Bucharest, just to name a few.

Slag Gallery was inaugurated in June 2008 in Chelsea and is now located at 522 West 19th Street, New York, NY, 10011

The exhibition “Earth Slipped and Heaven Spilled” is on view from October 29, 2020 to January 2, 2021.

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