Lynne Cohen Estate
Lynne Cohen (1944-2014) made important contributions to contemporary art as well as to photography itself. Her work enjoyed early critical acclaim and was from the beginning both highly innovative and rigorous. She is known for her photographs of domestic and institutional interior spaces, which have included living rooms, public halls, retirement homes, laboratories, offices, showrooms, shooting ranges, factories, spas, and military installations.
Trained as a sculptor and printmaker, when Pop Art and Minimalism were dominant in the art world, Lynne Cohen had a long-standing interest in the artificial and the everyday. She maily focused on the way places appear and function in our lives. The disorientation that her photographs provoke largely results from the specific and mysterious nature of these places with their odd symmetries, repetitions and absurd disjunctions of scale.
Starting in 1970, Lynne Cohen photographed unpeopled public and private interiors, notably living rooms, men’s clubs, classrooms, meeting rooms, conference halls, hotels, lobbies, offices, showrooms, waiting rooms, halls, corridors, spas, military installations, observations rooms, laboratories, shooting ranges, factories and other interiors. While her work has social, political and sometimes critical implication, it also has a wry humour. The places she photographs exist but they often look like constructions, even like installations. “I feel”, she once observed, “that the world can’t be like it is. It seems full of finished works of art”.
The pictures themselves, all meticulously crafted, are minimalist objects and her use of a plastic laminate frame makes them even more like objects and further blurs the boundary between the spaces depicted and the real world. The formal and narrative complexity of the finished photographs draws the viewer in and the closer one gets, the more the pictures open up. In 1999 she began to investigate how colour works as a distancing device and the many ways it renders space unreal.
There are 11 books devoted to Cohen’s photography: Occupied Territory, Aperture (1988 / 2012); L’endroit du décor / Lost and Found, FRAC-Limousin (1992); No Man’s Land, Thames and Hudson (2001); Camouflage, Le Point du Jour (2005); Cover, Le Point du Jour (2009); Lynne Cohen, Dazibao/Vu (2011); Nothing is Hidden (2012); Almas Gemeles, Tender Puentes, (2012); Faux Incides/False Clues, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2013); Lynne Cohen, Mapfre Foundation (2014); Lynne Cohen: Double Aveugle, Edition Hazan (2019).
Cohen received numerous awards from the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, and the Conseil des arts et des letters, Québec. In 1967 she received a Logan Award, 71st Annual Exhibition of Artists of Chicago and Vicinity, Chicago Art Institute, in 2001 received a Gold award in National Magazine Awards, Canada, in 2005 was accorded the Canadian Governor General’s Award in Visual Arts and Media Arts in 2005 and in 2011 was the first winner of the Scotiabank Photography Award.
She is represented in many public and private collections including Art Gallery of Ontario; Art Institute of Chicago; Australian National Gallery; Bibliothèque Nationale, France; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Compostela; Colección del Fondo Fotográfico, Museo Universidad de Navarra; Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid; George Eastman House Museum, Rochester, NY; several FRAC collections (France); International Center of Photography, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Musée d’art contemporain, Montréal; Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum voor Fotografie, Antwerp; National Gallery of Art, Washington; National Gallery of Canada; New York Public Library; Princeton University Art Museum; Tate Modern, London; Thessaloniki Museum of Photography; Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Alberta; Winnipeg Art Gallery.
Lynne Cohen has had well over 100 one-person shows and exhibited in more group shows, including major retrospectives at The National Gallery of Canada (2002), Musée d’art contemporain, Montréal (2013); Fundació Mapfre, Madrid (2014); Pavillon Populaire, Montpelier, France (2019) and Museum voor Fotografie, Antwerp (2020).
