Bernard Cohen

BERNARD COHEN (b 1933)

Bernard Cohen has described himself as "A storyteller and a creator of pictorial theatre."  His tensely wrought and unpredictably complex pictures hold a unique position within the canon of contemporary art.

Born in London, where he lives and works,  Bernard Cohen studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1951 to 1954. In 1988, he was appointed as Slade Professor and Director of the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London. Cohen's work came to prominence during the 1960s and has since been exhibited extensively.

Public exhibitions include a retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1972, which toured to Newcastle and Leeds; Artist in Focus, Six Paintings from the Tate Gallery Collection, Tate, London in 1995; Stroll on! Aspects of British Abstract Art in the Sixties, Mamco, Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva in 2006; and Abstraction and the Human Figure at CAM's British Art Collection, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, in 2010. In 2017, Cohen's work was featured as a Spotlight exhibition at Tate Britain, with a supporting film, It's A Matter of Dancing With Chaos Here. In 2018, Cohen featured in Post-Pop at the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon and in Kaleidoscope at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. 

Bernard Cohen's work is held in numerous public collections, including the British Council, Tate, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and MoMA.