Jennifer Cohen & Vlatka Horvat
Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, USA
Jennifer Cohen, Grey Line in Six Parts (i) (2008)
This exhibition pairs the work of American sculptor Jennifer Cohen with Croatian artist Vlatka Horvat, who share an interest in the representation of the body. While they traverse well-trodden territory, both artists – though particularly Cohen – find quietly incisive ways of exploring the compromised status of the female body, as well as an alchemy of transformation behind representation itself.
Cohen’s sculptures dominate the space like a collection of exotic hybrid creatures: geometric shapes are capped with glitter-strewn hands; a curve of concrete terminates in a black jazz shoe (Untitled, 2008) that somehow evokes Bob Fosse and Swan Lake at the same time. Each work is an amalgamation of the static and the kinetic, with the depersonalized concrete structure segueing into the vividly suggestive flourish of the shoe or the glove.
Jennifer Cohen, Untitled (2008)
In Cohen’s work there is a clear separation between the body (as represented in the concrete structures) and the objects that adorn and embellish it. These objects are grafted onto the body, injecting the abstract form with a distinctly animate aspect. Yet the sense is less of political engagement than of uncanniness; Cohen’s work is unsettling precisely because of its lack of a clearly declared agenda.
Vlatka Horvat, ‘Packages’ (2005)
Horvat’s photographs and collages are more direct: in one series, ‘Packages’ (2005), the artist is concealed in a range of different packaging – from boxes and bin-liners to gift wrap. The sense of the invisible or obscured nature of female identity is again literally represented in ‘Obstructed’ (2007), a series in which the artist is partially concealed by a distinctly phallic column. Those phallic symbols return in Horvat’s collages, which feature female bodies – stockinged and high-heeled legs, gesticulating arms – grafted onto everything from wind turbines to chainsaws and trombones. The idea of grafting and transformation is not unlike what occurs in Cohen’s sculpture, but here it is rendered rather more literally.
Cohen also uses her hybrid figures to evoke a state of compromise, with the leaden and inanimate limbs of her sculptures drawn into uncanny and reluctant life. But she does so with a keener sense of subtlety and reluctance that feels closer to both the predicament of gender identity today and the ongoing dilemmas of representation.
Katie Kitamura
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