Bruce Cohen

Still Life with Calla Lilies in Pitcher

2020

Drawing on influences from Dutch seventeenth-century painting and Surrealism, Bruce Cohen’s oil paintings portray ethereal interior scenes constructed from amalgamations of real and invented spaces. Beginning with an observation of light, Cohen creates small color studies and graphite renderings of light and shadow before transitioning to a collaging process, where memories, observations, and invented details come together to construct dreamlike scenarios. Cohen's tightly rendered compositions take on a cinematic, three-dimensional atmosphere with his usage of a crisp, hard edge style and contrasting saturated colors. Cohen's paintings affect the viewer as though they are intimately, perhaps voyeuristically, peering into the interiors of one’s home. Household objects show signs of habitation, but a figure never emerges. One looks for the story behind the empty room where a chair bathes in the shadowed stillness of a setting sun, and the meaning of a bouquet of brightly lit tulips in an interior cloaked by the clouds of a departing storm. Paul Wonner, Cohen’s mentor, described Cohen’s scenes as “a place where some tremendous, mystical event has just taken place.” The longer one spends observing the placement of each object, the quality of light, the traces, and folds in the tablecloth, the more one grasps for its shrouded narrative. Filled with tension and beauty, Cohen's works are quietly harmonic—as meditative as they are mysterious. Born in Santa Monica, California in 1953, Bruce Cohen continues to live and work in Southern California. He earned his BA from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1975. Cohen is represented in numerous public and private collections, including that of Phillip Morris, New York; Pacific Bell, Los Angeles; the San Diego Museum of Art; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.