Tamar Cohen+
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Tamar Cohen STATEMENT Two lifelong passions that drive my work are my love of polka dots and my ongoing enthusiasm for vintage paper ephemera, comics and books. I use collage and silkscreen to combine and juxtapose the two, creating a dynamic visual world of layered contrasts. This palette of visual obsessions inspires me in many ways, as I explore the relationship between high and low, order and chaos, the abstracted and the everyday. Dots are my figure, my landscape and my frame. These forms serve to focus, reveal, subsume and re-contextualize my abstracted paper narratives. The root of my narrative choices begins with a love of paper and its physical tactile nature. I am drawn to paper and books produced in the 1950s and ’60s: a time when printing techniques were basic and information was conveyed in a more simple and unsophisticated way. I also use a printing process that has not changed in decades. I find this all refreshing in today’s high-tech virtual world. BIO Tamar Cohen is a New York-born and-based artist whose collages reside at the intersection of high and low culture. She is inspired equally by the sublime and the banal; by Kurt Schwitters and Fred Flintstone; by polka dots and all shades of the color green. An obsessive collector of paper ephemera, Cohen loves candy packaging from around the world, maps, and Indian fireworks posters. Recently she discovered a passion for vintage children’s textbooks, dictionaries and comics from the 1960s. Cohen uses them to create silk-screened abstractions that, according to the New York Times, “Stand out for their color and beauty.” Her work has been shown at the Pavel Zoubok Gallery, the Islip Museum of Art, International Print Center New York, Kris Graves Projects, Pocket Utopia and the flat files at Pierogi 2000. ARTIST CONTACT [click to email] IMAGES
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