Bernard Cohen has described himself as "A storyteller and a creator of pictorial theatre". His tensely wrought and unpredictably complex pictures hold a unique position within the canon of contemporary art.
Born in London in 1933, he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1951-1954. In 1988 he was appointed Professor and Director of the Slade.
Cohen came to prominence during the 1960s and has since exhibited widely. Ten of Cohen’s paintings are in the permanent collection of the Tate Gallery. His first solo exhibition with Flowers was in 1998, and in 2007 the gallery hosted Bernard Cohen: Paintings from the Sixties, focusing on an important period in Cohen’s artistic development. In 2009 Work of Six Decades celebrated his career by bringing together a selection of key works. A comprehensive book accompanied this exhibition.
Other important shows include Artist in Focus, six paintings from the Tate Gallery Collection, The Tate Gallery, London in 1996 and Stroll on! Aspects of British Abstract Art in the Sixties, Mamco, Geneva in 2006. He is currently showing as a part of Abstraction and the Human Figure in CAMs British Art Collection, Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon.
Bernard Cohen currently lives and works in London.
Bernard Cohen CV