Art Basel 2026: Harold Cohen
Harold Cohen, The Last Machine Age, 2015
June 16—21, 2026
Booth Z10, Messe Basel, Basel, Messeplatz 10, Basel
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Gazelli Art House presents a solo booth dedicated to pioneering British artist Harold Cohen (1928–2016) at Zero 10 Art Basel 2026. Best known as the creator of AARON, one of the earliest autonomous systems for artmaking, Cohen first rose to prominence as a leading post-war painter, representing Great Britain at the 1966 Venice Biennale before turning toward computer- generated art in the late 1960s. Bringing together historical paintings, drawings, and live-running code systems, the booth offers audiences a rare opportunity to encounter AARON as Cohen intended: not as a historical artefact, but as a living studio collaborator operating in real time. Read more →
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Harold Cohen
All Four, 1964Acrylic and oil on egg tempera ground
130 x 130 cm
51 1/8 x 51 1/8 in -
The booth presentation opens with All Four (1964), a major early abstract painting exhibited in Harold Cohen: Paintings 1960–65 at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1965. Presented alongside his later machine-generated works, All Four highlights the continuity between Cohen’s painterly practice and his later computational systems. Its looping biomorphic forms and formal codification already suggest Cohen’s growing interest in systems, structure, and rule-based image construction years before he began programming computers.
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Harold Cohen
Untitled (i23-3459), 1968-1974DITRAN output and coloured felt tip on paper
56 x 67 cm
22 1/16 x 26 3/8 in -
Harold Cohen
Untitled (i23-3479), 1970Calcomp plotter drawing in ink on paper
48 x 69 cm
18 7/8 x 27 1/8 in -
Harold Cohen
Untitled (i23-3505), 1972Cohen-Machine drawing casein on paper
51 x 66 cm
20 1/8 x 26 in -
Harold Cohen
Untitled (i23-3578), 1972Plotter drawing in ink on paper
102 x 67 cm
40 1/8 x 26 3/8 in
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This formative period was shaped by Cohen’s move to the United States in 1968, where he joined the University of California San Diego and began learning to programme. Cohen produced foundational bodies of work such as the Contour Maps, Territorial Maps, and Maze drawings, developing the procedural logic that would later underpin AARON. Rather than instructing the machine what to draw, Cohen became increasingly interested in defining the conditions through which drawings could emerge autonomously. A rare example from this period, Untitled (i23-3578) (1972) belongs to Cohen’s seminal Maze series, produced using his First Generation Drawing Machine and early ‘freehand line’ algorithm. These works marked a pivotal moment in the development of AARON and Cohen’s broader investigations into rule-based artmaking.
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Harold Cohen
Untitled, 1987Coloured dye over Cohen-Machine drawing ink on paper
97 x 127 cm
38 1/4 x 50 in -
A key focus of the booth centres on Cohen’s ‘Painting Machine Era’ of the 1990s, when AARON became capable not only of autonomously generating drawings, but also physically applying colour through custom-built robotic hardware.
Works such as Untitled (i23-3391) (1997) and Machine Painting Series TCM #19 (1997) demonstrate this extraordinary moment in the history of AI art. In Untitled (i23-3391), geometric architectural forms and bold fields of saturated blue, crimson, and yellow reveal the remarkable sophistication of AARON during the late 1990s, as the programme developed increasingly complex relationships between figure, space, and colour, which Cohen would then realise by hand. Machine Painting Series TCM #19 represents a further development in AARON’s evolution, with the system not only generating the composition and colour structure, but also directing Cohen’s custom-built Painting Machine to physically apply dyes onto paper without direct human intervention. Together, these works mark a pivotal moment in the evolution of computer-generated art. -
The booth further traces the late evolution of AARON through works such as The Last Machine Age (2015), created during Cohen’s final years. Produced during his ‘finger painting’ period, the work reflects a renewed dialogue between artist and system, as touchscreens replaced earlier plotters and robotic hardware as the interface through which colour, gesture, and compositional structure were shaped.
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