James Cohan

Federico Herrero sees paintings everywhere, from street curbs and traffic signs to the painted trees and stones which proliferate in his native San José, Costa Rica. It is this examination of how color, shapes and signs define the urban environment that is vital to his practice as a painter. Herrero is best known for working on an operatic scale, regularly exhibiting immersive, site-specific wall paintings, monumental canvases, and cast concrete sculptures. In striking contrast, these intimately scaled canvases and monotypes create a rich, distilled vocabulary that explores the sensory and pictorial properties of Herrero’s painting and image making.

The artist Tecla Tofano (b. March 5, 1927, in Naples, Italy, d. October 20, 1995, in Caracas, Venezuela) was a critical figure in the Latin American feminist movement, carving a voice in an extremist socio-political atmosphere in Venezuela. This special presentation highlights an important group of ceramics from the 60s and 70s, expanding upon the gallery’s November 2023 exhibition, Tecla Tofano: This Body of Mine. A voracious maker, the artist channeled her ideas most notably through ceramics, though she was also an adept draftswoman, a metalsmith, and a writer. Tofano embraced rough, hand-built surfaces, as evidenced in her uncompromising works, which range from extruded body parts to fantastical figurines and elaborately formed vessels. Tofano is featured in Crafting Modernity, Design in Latin America, 1940–1980 through September 22, 2024 at MoMA, New York. James Cohan has published the first-ever monograph dedicated to the artist, co-edited by Gabriela Rangel and Luis Felipe Farías. It features an essay by Rangel, a detailed chronology by Farías, and translations of Tofano’s poetry and writing by Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola.

James Cohan is pleased to present The Mythic Age, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptural interventions by Naudline Pierre, on view from September 6 through October 19, 2024, at the gallery’s 48 Walker Street location. This is Pierre’s second solo exhibition with James Cohan. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist on Friday, September 6 from 6-8 PM. Transformation is the central tenet of Naudline Pierre’s practice: evolution of the self, metamorphosis of the female form, escape from our earthly existence into the luminous unknown, and material oscillations from fresco-like dry brushing to aqueous gestures. Pierre paints scenes that are ever-shifting, in states of mystery and ecstatic potentiality. Her characters’ limbs and wings extend beyond the picture plane, as if to suggest that this atmospheric world, devoid of a horizon line, continues infinitely. Pierre absorbs, borrows from, and reinvents disparate art historical references that span centuries, pointedly looking back to artists who did not and could not imagine her as their viewer, yet share a desire to reinvent and reimagine the universe. In her newest works, Pierre references Baroque and French academic painting of the 1800s, which opened the door to modernity and the heretical embrace of iconography in the service of personal, political, and radical self-expression. She draws freely from this distinctly male, European legacy of image-making, forming an intergenerational line between artists of radically different backgrounds to refashion historical motifs for a new audience.

James Cohan is pleased to present The Superfluity of Things, a group exhibition that celebrates the enduring vitality of the still life tradition for contemporary artists. This exhibition presents an intergenerational cross-section of artists working within and against the genre to plum its expressive possibilities across a variety of media, including painting, photography, and sculpture. The Superfluity of Things will be on view at 52 Walker Street from September 6 through October 19, 2024. The gallery will host an opening reception on Friday, September 6, from 6-8 PM. Throughout the history of art, depictions of the table and its contents have been used as a storytelling device to convey skillfully coded meaning and sociocultural significance to the viewer. Taking the genre of still-lifes as its entry point, this exhibition expands upon art historical precedents to think about the table not only as a site and signifier of power, position, and social status but also a place of gathering, sharing, communal pleasure, and on occasion, discord. One of the most enduring motifs throughout this exhibition is a series of varied approaches to vanitas painting; traditionally, still lives that contain allegorical collections of objects symbolic of the inevitability of death, the transience of life, and the vanity of earthly pursuits and pleasures. There is both a sense of horror and carnal delight infused in these highly detailed depictions of consumption and consumerism. In the hands of the contemporary artistic interpreters featured in this exhibition, these images often take a turn for the surreal and the humorous. Other artists in the exhibition examine the ways in which the table functions as connective tissue within families, across generations, or among friends. In these sensitive and sometimes fantastical depictions of memory making, the table is the stage for drama, celebration, and imaginative possibility. There is an intimacy to these scenes, often staged in private or domestic settings, within which the viewer is afforded a precious but fleeting glimpse of the moments that bind us together. In the creative consciousness, the studio as the crucible for generative thought and self-actualization looms large. For several artists in The Superfluity of Things, the drafting table or desk is fundamental and equally as meaningful a site for creative expression as any other. In several works in this exhibition, reference materials stack high, visualizing the many channels of thought that stream together to create an artwork.

James Cohan is pleased to present Mestre Didi, an exhibition of twelve totemic multimedia sculptures by the late Brazilian artist, Mestre Didi (Salvador, Bahia, 1917-2013), on view at 291 Grand Street from September 3 through October 26, 2024. This exhibition is made in collaboration with Simōes de Assis. Deoscóredes Maximiliano dos Santos, better known as Mestre Didi (Master Didi), was an influential Afro-Brazilian artist, spiritual leader, and writer. Didi’s singular oeuvre is closely linked to the Candomblé universe, a West African diasporic religion that developed in Brazil as a result of the transatlantic slave trade and with which Didi maintained a profound and generative relationship throughout his life. Followers of Candomblé believe in a pantheon of gods, known as Orixás, ancestral figures imbued with the divine energy of nature that mediate between the human and the Supreme. Didi’s sculptures, made predominantly from organic materials such as palm fronds, painted leather, cowrie shells, and colored beads, are direct heirs to the traditional art and liturgical objects of the Candomblé, as well as symbolic representations of these ancestral entities. Elements from the Yoruba imaginary and other West African visual cultures, such as birds, snakes, spears, and flames, are reworked by the artist into evocative pieces that echo the deities and mythic narratives of these religions. Articulated like trees sprouting from ornate concave circular bases, Didi’s works possess an elegant verticality and joyous gestural expression. Didi’s creative output, while steeped in the spiritual and inextricably tied to his position as a high priest, was not intended for direct religious use. Didi’s sculptures are creative interpretations and aesthetic celebrations of his cultural-spiritual practice. In Didi’s work, the encounter between tradition and African heritage unified with the vernacular of contemporary art brings to life a semi-abstract conceptual and emotional vocabulary that fuses past and present to restore and renew life. Mestre Didi has been featured in important solo and group exhibitions at institutions such as the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the Afro Brazil Museum, the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art; the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Curitiba; the Bahia Museum of Modern Art, Salvador; the National Historical Museum and the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art, in addition to being featured in the Bahia Biennial and the 23rd São Paulo Biennial. Abroad, he has exhibited in Valencia, Milan, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Accra, Dakar, Miami, New York and Washington. His works are featured in prominent institutional collections, including the Bahia Museum of Modern Art, the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, and the São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand Museum of Art.

James Cohan is pleased to present Arcadia and Elsewhere, an expansive group exhibition celebrating the breadth and complexity of contemporary landscape painting practices across geographies and generations. For the first time, this exhibition will unfold across all three of the gallery’s spaces, 48 & 52 Walker Street and 291 Grand Street, from January 12 through February 10, 2024. The gallery will host an opening reception on Friday, January 12 from 5-8 PM at its 48 and 52 Walker Street spaces. Arcadia and Elsewhere anchors landscape painting in the myriad portrayals of Arcadian landscapes, which portray nature as an idealized foil to the torrents of human civilization, stretching back into antiquity. The exhibition highlights the enduring prevalence of the landscape in contemporary painting, building connections between both established and emerging artists furtively engaged in the depiction of our natural surroundings as enduring sites of significance, while expanding and complicating the loaded ways in which landscape manifests as a form unto itself. Arcadia and Elsewhere features work by Spencer Finch, Yun-Fei Ji, Byron Kim, Mernet Larsen, Jordan Nassar, Eamon Ore-Giron, Katie Paterson, Naudline Pierre, Matthew Ritchie, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, and Fred Tomaselli, as well as Lindsay Adams, Hayley Barker, Jennifer Bartlett, Judith Belzer, Colin Brant, Kevin Brisco Jr, Hannah Brown, J. Carino, Ksenia Dermenzhi, Freya Douglas-Morris, Louis Eisner, Dean Fox, Christian Franzen, Brianne Garcia, Joshua Hagler, Josephine Halvorson, Tyga Helme, Barkley L. Hendricks, Ben Horns, Vera Iliatova, Linnea Jensen, Dominique Knowles, Wanda Koop, Maria Kreyn, Mark Laver, Matvey Levenstein, Larissa Lockshin, Sophia Loeb, Marin Majić, Nikki Maloof, Erica Mao, Christy Matson, Shara Mays, Zoe McGuire, Darby Milbrath, James Morse, Alice Neave, Kent O’Connor, Kemi Onabulé, Patricia Iglesias Peco, Alina Perez, Emilio Perez, Ken D. Resseger, Rosa Roberts, Aubrey Saget, Ilana Savdie, Noah Schneiderman, Muzae Sesay, Trevor Shimizu, Agnes Treherne, Joani Tremblay, Lumin Wakoa, Darryl Westly, Andy Woll, Coco Young, and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang.

James Cohan is pleased to present Arcadia and Elsewhere, an expansive group exhibition celebrating the breadth and complexity of contemporary landscape painting practices across geographies and generations. For the first time, this exhibition will unfold across all three of the gallery’s spaces, 48 & 52 Walker Street and 291 Grand Street, from January 12 through February 10, 2024. The gallery will host an opening reception on Friday, January 12 from 5-8 PM at its 48 and 52 Walker Street spaces. Arcadia and Elsewhere anchors landscape painting in the myriad portrayals of Arcadian landscapes, which portray nature as an idealized foil to the torrents of human civilization, stretching back into antiquity. The exhibition highlights the enduring prevalence of the landscape in contemporary painting, building connections between both established and emerging artists furtively engaged in the depiction of our natural surroundings as enduring sites of significance, while expanding and complicating the loaded ways in which landscape manifests as a form unto itself. Arcadia and Elsewhere features work by Spencer Finch, Yun-Fei Ji, Byron Kim, Mernet Larsen, Jordan Nassar, Eamon Ore-Giron, Katie Paterson, Naudline Pierre, Matthew Ritchie, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, and Fred Tomaselli, as well as Lindsay Adams, Hayley Barker, Jennifer Bartlett, Judith Belzer, Colin Brant, Kevin Brisco Jr, Hannah Brown, J. Carino, Ksenia Dermenzhi, Freya Douglas-Morris, Louis Eisner, Dean Fox, Christian Franzen, Brianne Garcia, Joshua Hagler, Josephine Halvorson, Tyga Helme, Barkley L. Hendricks, Ben Horns, Vera Iliatova, Linnea Jensen, Dominique Knowles, Wanda Koop, Maria Kreyn, Mark Laver, Matvey Levenstein, Larissa Lockshin, Sophia Loeb, Marin Majić, Nikki Maloof, Erica Mao, Christy Matson, Shara Mays, Zoe McGuire, Darby Milbrath, James Morse, Alice Neave, Kent O’Connor, Kemi Onabulé, Patricia Iglesias Peco, Alina Perez, Emilio Perez, Ken D. Resseger, Rosa Roberts, Aubrey Saget, Ilana Savdie, Noah Schneiderman, Muzae Sesay, Trevor Shimizu, Agnes Treherne, Joani Tremblay, Lumin Wakoa, Darryl Westly, Andy Woll, Coco Young, and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang.

James Cohan is pleased to present Arcadia and Elsewhere, an expansive group exhibition celebrating the breadth and complexity of contemporary landscape painting practices across geographies and generations. For the first time, this exhibition will unfold across all three of the gallery’s spaces, 48 & 52 Walker Street and 291 Grand Street, from January 12 through February 10, 2024. The gallery will host an opening reception on Friday, January 12 from 5-8 PM at its 48 and 52 Walker Street spaces. Arcadia and Elsewhere anchors landscape painting in the myriad portrayals of Arcadian landscapes, which portray nature as an idealized foil to the torrents of human civilization, stretching back into antiquity. The exhibition highlights the enduring prevalence of the landscape in contemporary painting, building connections between both established and emerging artists furtively engaged in the depiction of our natural surroundings as enduring sites of significance, while expanding and complicating the loaded ways in which landscape manifests as a form unto itself. Arcadia and Elsewhere features work by Spencer Finch, Yun-Fei Ji, Byron Kim, Mernet Larsen, Jordan Nassar, Eamon Ore-Giron, Katie Paterson, Naudline Pierre, Matthew Ritchie, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, and Fred Tomaselli, as well as Lindsay Adams, Hayley Barker, Jennifer Bartlett, Judith Belzer, Colin Brant, Kevin Brisco Jr, Hannah Brown, J. Carino, Ksenia Dermenzhi, Freya Douglas-Morris, Louis Eisner, Dean Fox, Christian Franzen, Brianne Garcia, Joshua Hagler, Josephine Halvorson, Tyga Helme, Barkley L. Hendricks, Ben Horns, Vera Iliatova, Linnea Jensen, Dominique Knowles, Wanda Koop, Maria Kreyn, Mark Laver, Matvey Levenstein, Larissa Lockshin, Sophia Loeb, Marin Majić, Nikki Maloof, Erica Mao, Christy Matson, Shara Mays, Zoe McGuire, Darby Milbrath, James Morse, Alice Neave, Kent O’Connor, Kemi Onabulé, Patricia Iglesias Peco, Alina Perez, Emilio Perez, Ken D. Resseger, Rosa Roberts, Aubrey Saget, Ilana Savdie, Noah Schneiderman, Muzae Sesay, Trevor Shimizu, Agnes Treherne, Joani Tremblay, Lumin Wakoa, Darryl Westly, Andy Woll, Coco Young, and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang.

The Language of Symbols explores the ways in which drawing lies at the heart of Monir’s multivalent practice, bringing together never-before-seen expressive early works on paper with later geometric drawings to demonstrate the medium’s significance as a place for the artist to exercise spatial thinking and create her own language of symbols on a singular plane.

Curated by Glenn Adamson and Kathy Butterly, Painting in the Dark brings together seven artists, spanning more than a century, who exemplify a painterly approach to the ceramic medium. Participating artists include Hugh Robertson (1845-1908), Rudy Staffel (1911-2002), Toshiko Takaezu (1922-2011), Rose Cabat (1914-2015), Tony Marsh (b. 1954), Marit Tingleff (b. 1954), and Kathy Butterly (b. 1963). Adamson has written a critical essay to accompany the exhibition.

Theatrical Production by Christopher Myers A Mass for Strange Children THURSDAY, MARCH 31 & FRIDAY, APRIL 1 AT 7:30 PM CHINESE CONSOLIDATED BENEVOLENT ASSOCIATION Christopher Myers presents A Mass for Strange Children, in conjunction with his exhibition, The Hands of Strange Children, at James Cohan's 52 Walker Street location. Myers engages with several of his frequent collaborators to create a series of performance vignettes relating to the syncretic revolutionaries he depicts in stained glass and tapestry works. These vignettes follow the structure of a catholic mass, but are infused with other performative source material including Hummingbirds, House Music, Beheadings, Tap dance, Punk, Scrying, and Abattoirs. Featuring: Helga Davis, Vuyo Sotashe, Reylon Yount, Kaneza Schaal, Sifiso Mabena, Ben Jalosa Williams, Anthony Dean, Yulan Grant, Ian Askew & Justin Allen. Performances will take place at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association at 62 Mott Street on Thursday, March 31, and Friday, April 1 at 7:30 PM.

James Cohan is proud to present Un/Common Proximity, a group exhibition featuring the works of the 2020-2021 NXTHVN Studio Fellowship artists: Allana Clarke, Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack, Esteban Ramón Pérez, Jeffrey Meris, Ilana Savdie, and Vincent Valdez. The exhibition is on view at the gallery’s Tribeca location, 48 Walker St, from June 12 through August 13. Un/Common Proximity is curated by 2020-2021 NXTHVN Curatorial Fellow, Claire Kim.

James Cohan is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, on view from January 29 through March 6 at 48 Walker Street and January 29 through February 27 at 291 Grand Street. The exhibition will span both of the gallery’s locations, with a presentation of two major sculptural series in Tribeca and a selection of the artist’s geometric drawings and Convertible sculptures in the Lower East Side. This is the late artist’s first exhibition with James Cohan.

James Cohan is pleased to present STEPS, an exhibition of new work by Grace Weaver, on view from July 15 through September 12 at 48 Walker St and September 13 at 291 Grand St. The exhibition will span both of the gallery’s locations, with a body of new paintings in Tribeca and a selection of the artist’s drawings in the Lower East Side. This is Weaver’s second solo exhibition at James Cohan. Both exhibitions are accessible by contactless appointment only. Please visit our website, call +1 212 714 9500 or email info@jamescohan.com to book an appointment.

James Cohan is pleased to present a selection of work by Nam June Paik. Our online viewing room showcases three of the artist's iconic sculptures, Main Channel Matrix, Music is Not Sound, and TV Service Robot. With a prolific output that included manipulated TV sets, video wall installations, live performances, single-channel videos, and global television broadcasts, Paik balanced a Utopian philosophy with a technical pragmatism and subversive sense of humor, creating artworks that drew on chance encounters between ideas, the object and the public. Paik emphasized that it is the artist's role in society to re-envision technology in the service of culture. His ideas resonate now, more than ever, as we conduct much of our lives virtually, partaking in Paik's vision of a "global village."

Visit our online viewing room to explore the provocative world of XU ZHEN®, whose sculptures intervene with cultural assumptions and taboos within a context of exchange between contemporary China and the west. Manipulating visual cues tied to western expectations of Chinese art and commerce, the artist’s works engage with—and often playfully transgress—the value systems and economic forces that shape perceptions of history and social difference in a globalized world. This online presentation has been organized on the occasion of ETERNITY vs EVOLUTION, the artist’s current retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. The viewing room features a video tour of the exhibition led by Peter Johnson, Curatorial and Programs Coordinator.

“A reset button for the universe pressed only once.” This phrase is from the artist Katie Paterson’s poignant Ideas series. Nowadays, we wonder if only. Robert Fludd, the 16th century Hermetic philosopher, was among the first to identify the relationship between the microcosmic and the macrocosmic. Fludd expressed the impulse to qualify and quantify the inherent link between man and the universe. As we now grapple for our place in the larger order of things and reckon with the contemporary moment, we have curated Cosmologies, a selection of our artists' approaches to matters of the universal. Participating artists include Simon Evans™, Mernet Larsen, Josiah McElheny, Lee Mullican, Katie Paterson, Matthew Ritchie, and Fred Tomaselli. In our online video feature, Josiah McElheny speaks about his Observation series, the visionary singer June Tyson, and the possibility and necessity of finding, seeing, and creating worlds unlike our own. A portion of the proceeds from sales will go toward the Food Bank for New York City.

Explore Firelei Báez's solo exhibition of new paintings in our online viewing room. Overlaying paint onto large-scale reproductions of found maps and documents, Báez casts diasporic histories into an imaginative realm, re-working visual references drawn from the past to explore new possibilities for the future. The artist populates historically-loaded representations of space with change-making creatures—whose hybrid forms incorporate folkloric and literary references, textile pattern, plantlife, and wide-ranging emblems of healing and resistance—to present fictional alternative universes. In our online video feature, Báez speaks about the exhibition, her ongoing use of found book pages, and mythologies ranging from the Dominican ciguapa to the black Atlantis developed in the techno music of Drexciya.

We are delighted to share A Lotus in a Sea of Fire, an exhibition of new work by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, in our online viewing room. Nguyen’s work explores the power of storytelling and the folklore traditions of diasporic communities. He extracts and re-works dominant, oftentimes colonial histories and supernaturalisms into imaginative vignettes. The online presentation features a video interview with the artist sharing his thoughts on the exhibition and the making of his film The Boat People.

James Cohan is pleased to present "El asesinato cambia el mundo / Assassination changes the world," an exhibition of new work by Teresa Margolles, on view from January 10 to February 29 at 48 Walker Street. This is the artist’s debut solo exhibition at James Cohan. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist on Friday, January 10 from 6-8 PM. Teresa Margolles investigates the social and aesthetic dimensions of conflict by infusing artwork with material traces of violence and loss. For this exhibition, she has created a new body of sculpture, photography, and installation that contends with the underlying causes of death and ongoing trauma on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border. Assembled in collaboration with communities affected by violence, the objects on view examine shared experience to underscore mutual accountability within a context of commemoration and collective mourning.

James Cohan is pleased to present James Cohan: Twenty Years, a special group exhibition celebrating the gallery's twentieth anniversary. On view from November 1 through December 20 at James Cohan's Tribeca and Lower East Side gallery spaces, the exhibition will feature new or historical works by every artist in the current program. James Cohan will host opening receptions on Friday, November 1 from 5-7 PM at 291 Grand Street and 6-8 PM at 48 Walker Street.