Harold Cohen: Painting About Representation (1962-71): Solo Show
Harold Cohen was fascinated by representation and the cognitive processes that make images stand for things and ideas. Throughout the 1960s he invented material that would be read "as if it were material in the real, physical world".
By the time he represented the UK at the Venice Biennale in 1966, he was confident that he could turn this invented material into "...a set of rules and then, almost without thinking, make the painting by following the rules." Two years later, provided with a language in which he could express these rules and a machine that could execute them, he made his first computer-generated paintings.
Sixty years on, the exhibition brings together 17 paintings from this transformative decade, from the large canvases of the 1960s to the Colored Maps of 1970-71, the years in which the painter's rules became the foundation for AARON.
As Harold put it: "My work wasn't representational in any common sense of the word, it was about representation."
