Harold Cohen: Painting About Representation (1962-71)

Bringing together seventeen works from a transformative decade in the artist’s career, the exhibition revisits Cohen’s remarkable achievements as a painter before his pioneering work with computers. From the ambitious abstract canvases that established his international reputation to the increasingly systematic investigations of his later paintings, the exhibition reveals how his enduring fascination with representation laid the intellectual foundations for AARON, one of the earliest and most influential artificial intelligence art-making systems. Best known today as a pioneer of computer-generated art, Cohen was already an internationally recognized painter when he began experimenting with programming in the late 1960s. His transition from canvas to computer was neither an abrupt departure nor a rejection of painting, but the continuation of a question that had occupied him for years: how do paintings come to represent things, and what knowledge is required to make them? Throughout the 1960s, Cohen explored the relationships between line, color, form, and pictorial space, inventing visual material that could be understood “as if it were material in the real, physical world,” as he later described in his 2010 talk Driving the Creative Machine. His paintings did not seek to reproduce recognizable subjects. Instead, they investigated the processes through which marks acquire meaning, shapes establish boundaries, and visual relationships suggest a world beyond the surface of the canvas. Increasingly, Cohen became interested not only in the images he created, but in the decisions and procedures that made their creation possible. Cohen’s emergence as a leading figure in postwar British abstraction followed an early period of considerable artistic recognition. Having studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, he held his first solo exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in 1951. Between 1959 and 1961, he traveled to New York on a Harkness Fellowship, exhibiting at Allan Stone Gallery before returning to London. In 1962, he presented a solo exhibition at Robert Fraser Gallery, marking the beginning of an especially productive period in which his paintings developed a distinctive and increasingly complex visual language. His international reputation grew rapidly. Associated with the influential Situation Group, Cohen participated in the Situation exhibition at the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA) Galleries in London in 1960, a significant moment in the development of British abstract painting. He went on to exhibit at Documenta III in Kassel in 1964, followed by the major survey Harold Cohen: Paintings 1960–65 at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1965. Writing in the exhibition catalog, critic John Richardson described him as “one of the most serious and thought-provoking painters in England today.” In 1966, Cohen was selected to represent Great Britain at the 33rd Venice Biennale alongside Anthony Caro, Bernard Cohen, Robyn Denny, and Richard Smith, firmly establishing his position among the foremost British abstract artists of his generation. The works brought together in this exhibition Painting About Representation (1962–71) trace the evolution of Cohen’s thinking during these pivotal years. Among the earliest, The Knight’s Gambit (1962) reduces the composition to a recurring contour, repeated, inverted, and reconfigured through contrasting bands of color. Writing in Studio International in 1966, critic David Thompson observed that Cohen referred to the ambiguous relationships within his paintings as “paradoxes”. In The Knight’s Gambit, a single visual element generates a succession of possibilities, anticipating the procedural thinking that would become central to his later practice. By 1964, works such as Next Year’s Valentine had developed into intricate arrangements of overlapping marks, grids, contours, and fields of color. A wash of mauve spreads across the bare ground; a scalloped dark green form, a loose dark brown grid and a looping red line are laid over it. At the right, a heart – the valentine of the title – is caught in a tighter red mesh and ringed with short radiating strokes. Each layer partly conceals and partly reveals what lies beneath. These paintings introduced a cartographic quality to Cohen’s visual language, with enclosed territories, shifting boundaries, and lines of passage suggesting systems of spatial organization rather than conventional pictorial representation. This exploration continued in Pastoral (1965), one of the paintings exhibited at the Venice Biennale the following year. Across its expansive surface, irregular fields of brown and teal are punctuated by clusters of vivid color and small looping lines. Although its title evokes landscape, the painting offers something closer to an imagined geography, viewed as though from above. Its relationship to mapping would later find an unexpected continuation in Cohen’s computer-generated Contour Maps and Territorial Maps, which similarly investigated how a surface might be divided into distinct yet interrelated regions. By the latter half of the decade, Cohen’s paintings had undergone another significant transformation. In works such as Edge (1967), the elaborate contours and enclosed forms of his earlier canvases gave way to repeated marks, atmospheric surfaces, and increasingly subtle relationships between color and space. Part of a series of rhombus-shaped paintings, Edge presents a field of blue dots across a red-brown ground, creating a surface that resists a stable distinction between figure and background. The monumental diptych Array (1967) takes this investigation further. Across two panels, each more than two meters high, a continuous lattice of ochre dots extends over a softly sprayed ground of pink and violet. Variations in color and density create shifting optical relationships, as individual marks appear alternately to advance and recede. The painting’s title, Array, evokes