Bio

 

Noga Cohen (b. 1994, Israel) is New York based artist and educator. she received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2021. She is the recipient of the Immigrant Artists Program Fellowship of NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) for 2021-22. In 2018, she received the Gross Foundation Prize, the Adams Prize, and the SBY grant for emerging artists. Noga moved to New York City in 2019 to pursue a career as a visual artist. While earning her MFA, she won the David Berg Foundation Fellowship, the Artis Contemporary Fellowship, and the Brevoort-Eickemeyer Fellowship. Her work has been included in venues such as Amos Eno Gallery (Brooklyn), ChaShaMa (New York), Wallach Gallery (New York), Project V Gallery (New York), The Art Lab (Tel Aviv), and more. Her work was featured in publications such as ArtForum, Art and Education, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Magazine, and more. 

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Artist’s Statement

 

Noga Cohen works in sculpture, installation, and mixed media art to navigate through psychological and existential themes of perilousness and protection. Her work draws a line between temporality, decay, and preservation, and addresses the relationship between the human body and trauma. Her practice is pushing the limits of found materials and exploring natural processes of decomposition and putrefaction through nontraditional sculptural techniques. She collects everyday objects, furniture, plastic waste, and industrial materials used in house constructions, and manipulates them by using methods of deconstruction and rebuilding, to investigate their inherent qualities. In her sculptural process, she stacks, hangs, breaks, tears, wraps, stuffs, and uses heat, time, and gravity, to construct objects that reveal anthropomorphic elements. Her work contextualizes different aspects of violence, destruction, and precariousness. It offers a critical political point of view of the ways the human body is perceived, utilized, and valued in the current time. Her work highlights wounded bodily textures and forms as physical manifestations of trauma. She reconstructs fragmented residues, accumulated marks, scars, and traces, to explore concepts of mortality and loss.