The American artist/photographer Jeff Cowen is being celebrated in three big shows this spring and summer — in Berlin, Stockholm, and Amsterdam (plus a smaller simultaneous exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam).
Each exhibition features new and different work, with a major focus on all-new work made in the countryside around Aix-en-Provence, the former stomping grounds of Cézanne and Van Gogh.
Cowen is a master of the darkroom, and he applies his training as a fine art painter to his (often very large) silver gelatin prints using using a variety of chemicals and light to create painterly abstractions that are unlike almost anything else called photography.
The resulting one-of-a-kind pieces of artwork are stunning in ways that only the best art can stop you in your tracks and make you take notice of something rare and unusual. They seem to vibrate in three dimensions with remarkable depth, and often feel as if an explosive force of some complex physics has been released and captured on photographic paper. Some appear to defy gravity, with splatters and beads of light shooting out and bending around other invisible forces.
While Cowen’s work is at the center of the show in Berlin, it is great to see them in the context of supporting works by Hans Bellmer, Joseph Beuys, Anna & Bernhard Blume, Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore, Germaine Dulac, Rudolf Koppitz, Albert Leo Peil, Sigmar Polke & Christof Kohlhöfer, and Margaret Raspé.
If you are in Berlin, go see these works in person. Highly recommended.
SÉANCE at HOUSE is open to the public on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday between 12 and 7 pm.