Jeanine Cohen is a Belgian artist who researches colour and form. With her three-dimensional wall works, reliefs, she explores the effects of colours and shapes on our spatial experiences.
Trained in screen printing and industrial design at ENSAV La Cambre, since the beginning of her career, the artist has felt an attraction to painting, which she has taught to herself. In love with colour, she makes it the meeting place for a pictorial and spatial experience which her reliefs immediately invite you to. Each tone used is chosen maturely by the artist, and is the result of in-depth research, achieved by the superimposition of successive layers of pigment. The colours in her palette are unique creations in themselves, which bear witness to the chromatic diversity of the world around us.
Cohen's work—unambiguously claimed as painting by the artist—retains all the classic material attributes of the medium: stretcher bars, canvas, and color. These elements are openly displayed, expressing nothing but themselves—wood, fabric, pigments. The materiality of the components is a foundational element of Jeanine Cohen’s practice. In this, she aligns herself with Minimalism, but she elevates it through her compositional sensibility and a sensitive use of color. These colors stand out, in flat, assertive, and joyful planes, often reduced to pure spectrum, or sometimes held back, retreating. They then occupy the reverse side, becoming reflections, light, traces. At times, they reclaim the entire surface of the piece, shading it with delicate and profound monochromes.
The rhythmic precision, with its perfectly mastered harmonies, hides imperceptible fluctuations. Between these sculptural lines and colored surfaces, secret connections emerge, revealed by light. Emitting subtle vibrations, the lines blur or sharpen depending on how the light shifts. What should remain fixed moves ever so slightly. Light becomes the fourth material of the painting. Through its movement and intensity, it transforms the austerity of the construction and makes the work pulse with life. What unfolds is a poetic and elusive play of contradictions: inside/outside, color/material, visible/invisible, determination/indetermination.
Jeanine Cohen was born in 1951 in Brussels, Belgium, where she lives and works.
Her works have been exhibited in museums and galleries in Portugal, Iceland, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, France, Poland, Israel and the US in solo exhibitions as well as group exhibitions. Her work also consists of site-specific projects for corporate and private institutions. Jeanine Cohen’s works are part of private, public and corporate collections in many countries around the world.
Recent solo exhibitions include:
Inner Space, Hverfis Gallery, Reykjavik (IS), 2022; Lee-Bauwens Gallery, Brussels (BE), 2021: Wy not ? Autre chose, Atelier 34zero Muzeum, Brussels (BE), 2020; Nomad Gallery, Brussels (BE), 2018; The space between, Hverfis Gallery, Reykjavik (IS), 2017
Recent group exhibitions include:
Lumières!, Gallery Alice Mogabgab, Beirut, Libanon, 2022; LEAF, Limited Edition Art Fair at Boghosian Foundation, Brussels (BE), 2022; Paysages de Formes, Pont-Scorff (FR), 2019; Therefore, Everything is light, Barbé Urbain Gallery, Gent (BE), 2018; Private Choices, Centrale for contemporary (Collection Y. De Bontridder),
Brussels (BE), 2017.