Bernard Cohen | Paintings - 1950s and 1960s: 7 Piccadilly Arcade

Bernard Cohen: Paintings from the 1950s and 1960s presents a focused exploration of the formative decades of Bernard Cohen's practice, tracing the emergence of a distinctive abstract language at a moment when British painting was undergoing profound transformation.

 

Born in London and educated at Central Saint Martins and the Slade School of Fine Art, Cohen belonged to a generation that redefined the possibilities of painting in the post-war period. As a founding member of the DANAD Design collective, alongside figures such as Peter Blake and Robyn Denny, he engaged with a cross-disciplinary dialogue between art, design, and architecture, situating his work within a broader cultural shift towards modernity and experimentation.

 

The works in this exhibition centre on Cohen's output from the late 1950s through the 1960s, a period marked by an energetic engagement with abstraction and an openness to international influence, particularly that of Abstract Expressionism. During these years, Cohen developed compositions that balance spontaneity with control, combining gestural mark-making with an increasingly considered sense of structure. His canvases resist fixed spatial hierarchies, instead unfolding as dynamic fields in which line, form, and colour operate in continuous dialogue.

 

Cohen's paintings from this period are defined by their restless intelligence. Surfaces are activated through layered gestures and shifting rhythms, creating compositions that feel both immediate and deeply constructed. Rather than presenting abstraction as a resolved language, these works propose it as an open field of enquiry, one in which visual elements are tested, repeated, and reconfigured. This sense of investigation would later evolve into the more intricate, pattern-based works of the 1970s, but here remains in a state of generative flux.

 

International recognition came early, with Cohen's work included in British Council touring exhibitions and his participation in the Venice Biennale 1966, situating him within a global context of post-war abstraction. Yet these early paintings retain a distinctly personal approach, defined less by adherence to a single movement than by a sustained commitment to exploring how painting can construct meaning through form alone.

 

Bringing together a carefully selected group of works, this exhibition offers a rare opportunity to engage with the origins of Cohen's visual language. It reveals an artist in the process of defining his terms, testing the limits of abstraction, and establishing a practice grounded in rhythm, structure, and perceptual complexity. In doing so, it positions Cohen not only within the history of British abstraction but as a painter whose early work continues to resonate with clarity and relevance today.