HAROLD COHEN

Bringing together a selection of works from a transformative decade in the artist’s career, the exhibition revisits Cohen’s remarkable achievements as a painter before his pioneering work with computers. From the ambitious abstract canvases that established his international reputation to the increasingly systematic investigations of his later paintings, the exhibition reveals how his enduring fascination with representation laid the intellectual foundations for AARON, one of the earliest and most influential artificial intelligence art-making systems.

Best known today as a pioneer of computer-generated art, Cohen was already an internationally recognized painter when he began experimenting with programming in the late 1960s. His transition from canvas to computer was neither an abrupt departure nor a rejection of painting, but the continuation of a question that had occupied him for years: how do paintings come to represent things, and what knowledge is required to make them?

Throughout the 1960s, Cohen explored the relationships between line, color, form, and pictorial space, inventing visual material that could be understood “as if it were material in the real, physical world,” as he later described in his 2010 talk Driving the Creative Machine. His paintings did not seek to reproduce recognizable subjects. Instead, they investigated the processes through which marks acquire meaning, shapes establish boundaries, and visual relationships suggest a world beyond the surface of the canvas. Increasingly, Cohen became interested not only in the images he created, but in the decisions and procedures that made their creation possible.