A painting well-suited to its title, Shimmer, 1968, sees a web of circles laced over a shifting coloured background. The resulting effect is iridescent, the subtle colour variations in both the circular forms and background work in unison to vary the depth within the painting and waver our physical interaction with the work.

Acrylic on canvas, Shimmer was included in Cohen’s 1968 exhibition at Modern Art Oxford. Titled matter-of-factly, New Paintings, this show again established a departure - in this instance from the more diagrammatic work in the Whitechapel show of 65’. In Oxford the works are more immersive, minimal, abstract fields of form and colour. Adopting a new technique, Cohen here applied the pearlescent background by spraying the canvas, enabling an even spread of colour across the canvas. The uniform circular forms were achieved through use of a stencil. In a 1968 interview for Studio International Cohen described how until a few years previous to the creation of Shimmer, his work had primarily been concerned with drawing and that the centrality of colour in his painting had been a gradual development - one that he had initially tried to resist. In opposition to line, which he considered as functioning to separate and divide the canvas, Cohen’s use of colour was motivated by a desire to make his work more cohesive. Transitioning from a ‘splattering’ to ‘spraying’ approach, in 1966/7 he was observing the optical effects of colour pairing but described his intention to advance and articulate colour theory beyond ‘edge to edge’ colour. He didn’t want to contain colour as thus maintained the use of a line, rather his goal was ‘to get to the state where the painting disappears and just leaves colour’