Wendy Cohen

Wendy Cohen’s paintings mix what she calls “fearless brushstrokes” and a “broad spectrum of interesting colors.” That bold color palette is inspired by the cultures of South Africa, where Cohen was born, and Australia, where she currently lives. The thickly layered surfaces of her canvases use both paint and other media to create a world in which one image exists on top of another, and colors alternate between being densely saturated and deceptively translucent. There is an earthy quality to her images, but that earthiness is juxtaposed with a geometric clarity and elegant sense of abstraction that brings such modernist masters as Picasso and Chagall to mind.

Cohen says that the main theme of her work is the face, but faces take a wide variety of forms in her paintings — from a simple totemic scrawl to a multi-colored assemblage of shapes that coalesce into a face before our eyes. A surprising sense of playfulness is also on display, pulling the viewer into a world that is as much fun as it is challenging.