The Knight's Gambit, 1962

The Knight’s Gambit, 1962, was painted a year after Cohen returned from his Harkness Fellowship in New York and the year of his first solo exhibition at Robert Fraser Gallery in London. Cohen here pared the painting back to a few elements: a single contour, stated on the left in bands of green, yellow and red, inverted in blue beneath a horizontal line, and restated twice more on the maroon ground at the right.

Writing in Studio International in 1966, David Thompson noted that Cohen called the images in his paintings “paradoxes”, and that in his work “the inside of a line” could define a shape while its outside suggested a spatial boundary. The Knight’s Gambit sets out that double reading in its plainest form. One shape is stated, reflected and reworked, so that the painting reads less as a single image than as a sequence of moves, as the chess term in its title suggests. The procedural thinking that Cohen would bring to his work with computer code at the end of the 1960s can be clearly felt.