Exhibition Review: Cora Cohen's Poetics of Sensation

Cora Cohen. "Wind in Pines," 2022. Flashe, pigment, silkscreen ink, and watercolor on linen. 55 x 79." Image courtesy of the gallery.

By COLLEEN DALUSONG November 4, 2025

If I had to describe Cora Cohen’s art in one word, it would be “enigmatic.” I am reminded of a swan elegantly gliding across the water while fiercely paddling beneath the surface. There is more than meets the eye when one encounters a Cora Cohen painting, particularly among those exhibited in Greene Naftali’s A Decade: 2012-22, a survey show of Cohen’s work from the last decade of her career. Each piece is the culmination of Cohen’s personal explorations into achieving a poetics of sensation.

Through her meticulous layering of flashe, pigment, silkscreen ink, and watercolor on a linen surface, Cohen achieves a luminous effect in one of her final paintings, Wind in Pines. There is a translucent gleam of light, reminiscent of mother-of-pearl inlays, shifting between bold strokes of dusky green and ruddy brown, evoking the feeling of a gentle breeze fluttering past a forest’s sturdy tree trunks. Wind in Pines is an utterly sensuous painting, ambitiously utilizing Cohen’s knowledge of material, layers, and density to create a work that is at once abstract yet wholly an unmistakable homage to the natural world. 

Cora Cohen. "Paint Table Arabesque," 2015. Flashe, acrylic, and watercolor on linen. 48 x 77." Image courtesy of the gallery.

Cohen’s fascination with the complexity of expressing the passage of time is exemplified in Paint Table Arabesque. As the title suggests, the linen canvas once served as a tablecloth in the artist’s studio, upon which Cohen and her assistants would spill, stain, and smear various materials over the course of their day-to-day routines. After years of daily use had built up a collection of shared histories, accidents, and happenings layered atop the linen’s surface, Cohen eventually decided to paint over it, depicting an ambiguously desert-like scene with figures resembling cacti and a bonfire. However, Cohen still left visible traces and residue of the linen’s past as a paint table in her studio, aligning with her process-based ethos of honoring the accidental abstractions of the world which often take the form of discoloration, damage, and dust. 

I say that Cora Cohen’s art is enigmatic, precisely because one gets the sense that she conceived them out of a genuine wish to more fully understand her own ideas and how to materially achieve them through the act of creation. A single painting could take months or years before Cohen felt enough satisfaction to consider the work to have reached its point of completion. Yet Cohen was not seeking a finished product, instead she enjoyed lingering in the process of discovering and working through the challenges of each composition. There is an intensity and passion in her work that could only be obtained after years of experience, trial, and error. At the same time, Cohen’s body of work from the last decade of her career continues to carry the spirit of a young artist who has only recently fallen in love with painting and is eager to throw their heart and soul into learning more and more.

Installation view. "A Decade: 2012-22." Greene Naftali, New York, 2025. Image courtesy the estate of Cora Cohen and Greene Naftali, New York.