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.