In May 1965, Harold Cohen opened his solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Although the exhibition covered just five years of activity, the work on display was expansive in its range of ideas, its practical exploration of paint, and its progressive approach to thinking about and creating art. The earliest works were produced between 1959 and 1961 in the United States, where Cohen spent time in New York on a Commonwealth Fellowship. This period proved transformative: having previously painted in an Abstract Expressionist style, he radically shifted his artistic direction, stripping his work back to its fundamentals and starting again.

In the introduction to the Whitechapel exhibition catalogue, John Richardson identifies this pivotal change, noting that “the earliest pictures on these walls reveal the impact that America and American painting had on the artist. The latest ones, completed only a few weeks ago, show that he has become one of the most serious and thought-provoking painters in England today.”

Search, 1964, is a mesmerising painting that exemplifies Cohen’s intensely focused approach to the distribution of forms across the canvas. Painted in February 1964, it employs a relatively limited colour palette and a precise, controlled use of shape. Three biomorphic forms partially hover above a field of peach, intersected by sinuous green lines. The linear elements evoke the visual language of cartography, yet this association is disrupted by the viewer’s upright, vertical relationship to the work, resisting any straightforward reading as a map. Read with a knowledge of Cohen’s later output, the visual language of the painting can be seen as referencing circuit boards, the green lines connoting electrical currents and the gridded elements recalling electronic diagrams.