James Cohan

Viewing Room

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.

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 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.