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| Biography: |
Artist born in Mexico City, in 1939. He trained at the Academy of San Carlos, at Mexico City College (today University of the Americas) and drawing and painting workshops by teachers Arnold Belkin, Silva Santamaría, Antonio Rodríguez Luna and Muñoz Medina. He always considered drawing as an autonomous territory, with the same artistic dignity as painting, so he dedicated himself to this technique in an especially intense way over more than three decades. His work was full of passion, sensuality, humor, critical gaze and a repeated ironic perspective that tried to strip the objects and beings of that pompous solemnity behind which often hide other "realities" that Cohen insisted on discovering time to build Hence his inclination towards expressionist drawing as a way to choose to show reality, not as it appears to our senses but as perceived by an intensely subjective look that changes, disrupts and alters our customary conventions to express a deeply personal emotion.
Cohen devoted himself, with singular determination, to exploit the possibilities offered by simple materials, such as pencil, charcoal, ink or watercolor, in order to achieve through them, extensive series in which he gave free rein to his imagination . The result was made up of hundreds of drawings in which certain thematic obsessions are repeated that arose from the artist's hand not premeditated, but from an unconscious manifested through what the lines or spots suggested, as well as the demands of the composition imposed by its aesthetic vision. As the work matured, the academic drawing was left behind to give way to eloquent figurative deformations of what an acute, ironic and fresh look can achieve in its obsession to transform and communicate reality creatively, thus giving it new meanings. Cohen's constant search gave rise to an unusual versatility. His references were explicit: aware of his admiration for Francis Bacon, Grosz, Gongora, Schielle and Orozco, to name a few examples, he explored those shared paths with the result that such references were finally exceeded by imposing his absolutely personal stamp on his work. Towards the end of the eighties, the detailed drawing gives way to an informal impulse of violent and simplified lines from which its virtuosity manifests itself in a new and freer aspect. A few spots and scattered lines spread across the paper with ease and mastery to synthetically express a formal structure that impresses just by the intensity achieved from a surprising economy of media. The cake is going to be used more and more frequently by Cohen and this gives rise to color entering its plastic world as an element both enriching and challenging. For Eduardo Cohen, for many years a cartoonist who faced insecurity with the challenges imposed by color, the cake gradually provided him with a possibility of renewed creation through the bold management of color that was used analogously with the same degree of freedom and imaginative use of the accident. In those same years is when Cohen receives the mission of painting a mural for a synagogue and shortly thereafter two series of stained glass windows for Jewish school libraries. These commissions, in addition to stimulating him to an arduous work of investigation in reference to the chosen subjects - the Jewish holiday ritual, the biblical prophets and the creation of the world according to a very free interpretation of the biblical text - turn him towards the discovery of the sensuality of the work in larger spatial dimensions. Once the floodgates of the use of color were uncovered, Eduardo Cohen dedicated himself in the last five years of his life to the creation of oil paintings on paper. The stain and the accident were the starting point of compositions in which human figures, animals and objects were deployed with drama, humor or mercy, and where color and texture, light and shadow, were handled in such a way that they managed to convey a poetic charge not without ambiguity, made at the same time of pain and exaltation, a sign of those varied moods that marked Cohen in those times when the disease overwhelmed him. Eduardo Cohen devoted much of his life to teaching the drawing of the human figure and art theory. Tireless and intense reader of a variety of topics, his self-taught training made him possess the advantages of interdisciplinarity. He published at the end of 1992 under the seal of the Institute of Philological Research of the UNAM his book "Towards an existential art", reflections of an expressionist painter, book in which the theoretical and analytical path of the artist is condensed, as well as his commitment to the permanent search for renewed aesthetic codes and the consequent rejection of the flattery of cliques and the commodification of its production. At his death, on June 15 of 1995, he kept in his studio about three thousand works, most of them never before exhibited. After an arduous selection work, it was presented in July of 1997 and under the auspices of the Directorate of Plastic Arts of the UNAM, a great retrospective exhibition in the Mining Palace enclosures, which would later begin an itinerant tour of various museums of the Mexican province The book “Eduardo Cohen 1939-1995” was also published based on the aforementioned sample. The purposes of the gaze ”edited by UNAM with the support of the Eduardo Cohen AC Cultural Foundation, recently created. In the almost 200 pages of this book the most representative of Cohen's trajectory appears, accompanied by an analytical text by Maestro Andrés de Luna, curator of the exhibition, who considers Cohen “one of the great artists of this Mexican century and one of the greatest artists of this continent from which Borges so much belittled. ” |
| English speaker: | Si |
| Website: | http://www.eduardocohen.com.mx |
| Participation Date: | 10 September 2019 |