In Conversation: Bernard Cohen and Nathan Cohen with Philip Dodd

About

Bernard Cohen (b. 1933) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1951-1954. In 1988 he was appointed as Slade Professor and Director of the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London. Cohen came to prominence during the 1960s and has since exhibited widely. His first solo exhibition with Flowers Gallery was in 1998. In 2007 the gallery hosted Bernard Cohen: Paintings from the Sixties, focusing on an important period in Cohen’s artistic development, followed by Work of Six Decades in 2009, which celebrated his career by bringing together a selection of key works and the publication of a comprehensive book. A subsequent survey exhibition titled About Now: Paintings and Prints 2000-2015 took place at Flowers Gallery in 2015, accompanied by the book About Now by Ian McKay. Other important exhibitions include Artist in Focus, Six Paintings from the Tate Gallery Collection, The Tate Gallery, London in 1995; Stroll on! Aspects of British Abstract Art in the Sixties, Mamco, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva in 2006; and Abstraction and the Human Figure at CAM’s British Art Collection, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon in 2010. Bernard Cohen lives and works in London.  Ten of Cohen’s paintings are in the Tate collection, and his work is included in numerous public collections worldwide.

Nathan Cohen (b. 1962) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, and Chelsea College of Art. He has exhibited internationally for over thirty years, including one person and retrospective shows in the UK, Europe and Japan. In addition to his work as an artist his published writing embraces ideas about perception, abstraction and relationships between art and science. Between 1985-1990 he co-published and edited Constructivist Forum and from 1990-2010 co-directed ‘Archive 90: International Archive of Abstract and Constructive Art’, including curating exhibitions in the UK, Netherlands and Japan. In 2011 he established the first MA Art and Science at University of the Arts London, and is currently the Arts Research Director for an international Art and Science Research group, located in Japan, France and the UK. Nathan Cohen’s work is represented in public and private collections worldwide. He currently lives and works in London.

Philip Dodd is a writer, broadcaster and curator who works between Europe and China. He has recently curated a 5 city retrospective of Sean Scully in China as well as an exhibition of Gillian Ayres at CAFA Art Museum, Beijing. In 2016 he was named one of the 100 art Innovators by the US magazine Art & Auction and in the same year one of the Top Global Thinkers by China Business News. Between 1997 and 2004, he was director of the ICA and has curated exhibitions in Moscow, London, New York, Singapore, as well as across China. He has executive produced films with figures as diverse as Edward Said and Steve McQueen. His co-edited volume of essays on Englishness has been recently republished by Bloomsbury. He is the Chairman Made in China (UK) Ltd