FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Walking a Line
Nancy Cohen
NEW YORK, NY –– January 28rd, 2022 –– Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is thrilled to announce an exhibition of new glass sculpture and works on/of paper by Nancy Cohen. Walking a Line marks the artist’s third solo exhibition in the gallery.
Cohen works concurrently in two media. She creates organic sculptural forms from pieces of glass, and she creates drawings on hand-made paper using pigmented paper pulp as the drawing medium. These two ways of working are closely related both formally and conceptually. Both the paper pulp and the sculpted glass function as the substrate for drawing lines, and both mediums are the physical embodiment of the essential thread that unites all of Cohen’s work– the relation between fragility and strength. Paper and glass both walk the line between strong and fragile, and Cohen is interested in pushing both mediums to the limit.
Line is the dominant formal element on all works in this exhibition. Both Sculpture and paper are covered with lines that both unite and divide, define or obscure. As Cohen says about the Line:
“There is a fine fragile line between existence and its opposite, a line we all walk and which the small and large environments that contain us walk as well. Environmental and personal vulnerability has been a longstanding focus in my work. Waterways, in particular, with their almost human balance of fragility and strength, their perseverance through adversity—much of it inflicted by us—trace lines of stress and hope through our landscapes—as well as a strong line through the body of my work.”
Finally, the line between existence and its opposite has been sharpened for all of us in recent years with the climate crisis and, more recently, the Covid pandemic. At the same time, the line between our individual fragilities and those of the collective and the planet have been blurred. Individually, we have often been isolated—themes of escape and flight, literal and imagined, figure heavily in work I’ve produced in the pandemic period—but our fragile bodies and our fragile environment are inextricably linked. More than ever, we walk the line together.”
Nancy Cohen has exhibited throughout the United States, including at the Garrison Art Center, the Hunterdon Art Museum, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, and the Jersey City Museum and New Jersey State Museum. Her work is in the collections of Citibank, Howard University, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Montclair Art Museum, and the Yale University Museum.
