Sarah Cohen: Town & Country

Sarah Cohen recreates scenes from her native Massachusetts coastline or New York’s bucolic city parks with quiet but often unnerving undertones, placing her work among popular contemporaries like Alex Katz, Richard Diebenkorn, and Maureen Gallace. Content for Cohen’s compositional imagery derives the artist’s personal photo reel, scenes of everyday life mythologized by her own unspoken narratives. Each picture becomes elevated by Cohen’s layered coloration strategy, transporting the original setting to an often enchanting, meditative, or melancholic stage. While Cohen’s work distinguishes itself through her adept use of painterly applications and her subtle modifications to realist styles of representation, Cohen’s ability to romanticize seemingly mundane elements of contemporary life relies on the act of noticing, a practice that carries implications beyond the sphere of painting. 

Sarah Cohen is a painter originally from Marblehead, Massachusetts. She studied formally at Boston University and recently finished her MFA at Hunter College. She will feature new paintings in Hyacinth’s summer group show titled Metropolis. Her first in-person solo exhibition is scheduled for January 2025.