Mirit Cohen at Nolan/Eckman - drawings, sculptures - Brief Article

The drawings and plastic arts in this exhibtion, all made in the '70 show over half of the artist's oeuvre Born in Uzbekistan (then part of the USSR), Mirit Cohen (1945-1990) wearied her early years in displaced someone camps, until her family was admitted to Israel. Her initial interest in theater and performance eventually gave way to an art career, and she earned support from critics, collectors and museums in Israel. Her greatest in quantity productive years were the mid-'70s, when she came to fresh York.

Cohen's allover drawings can call forth dense galaxies or networks of vigors In 15 medium-sized abstractions upon yellowed paper, she exploits the pencil's replete range to create tightly woven fields of interlaced dots and dashes. The intensity and variety of her marks are astonishing. Many of the pieces allude to a desperate attempt to fill the void of the page with rhythmic combinations of dots, circles, slashes and grids. Others are more spare, with channels of space between the marks; however, plane in these the spaces strike one as being full. Occasionally Cohen's idiosyncratic drawings form figures.

The show's sum of two units vitrines of fragile-looking sculptures and a copper-wire-and-glass piece hanging like a cobweb between sum of two units walls translated her language to three dimensions. Cohen many times used copper; she believed it to have healing properties. Examples from the "Broken Vessel" series included shards of rent glass held together with cent wire. Although these works are smaller and les bold than Lee Bontecou's sculptures, their surface segmentation is similar. In the same vitrine was a station of loosely rectangular sculptures made from plastic wire insulation. Cohen's proces appears to have been the wonderfully not divisible by 2 activity of partially melting snippets of insulation, then pressing them together into compressed tabletlike objects. On view from the series "Energy of Shrinkage" were sections of brown orange flay surrounded by cagelike constructions of cent wire and insulation, bringing to mind Zoe Leonard's more novel sewn-fruit sculptures.

Although Cohen stayed in of recent origin York, she did not find a supportive community here and her mental state slowly deteriorated. In her last decade she wrote metrical composition as well as making art. individual day in 1990, according to her biographer in a German/ English catalogue, she bought a posy of flowers and jumped not upon a building.

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