Exhibitions featuring Jeff Cowen 2024

This spring, we are thrilled to announce exhibitions featuring the renowned artist Jeff Cowen at

HOUSE BERLIN – SÉANCE – April 12th - June 14th, 2024

Fotografiska Stockholm – BERLIN WORKS – May 17th - September 8th, 2024

Huis Marseille Museum for Photography - PROVENCE WORKS – June 22nd - October 13th, 2024

The VAN GOGH Museum in Amsterdam - PROVENCE WORKS – June 22nd - October 13th, 2024

HUIS MARSEILLE + THE VAN GOGH MUSEUM IN AMSTERDAM PRESENTS PROVENCE WORKS BY JEFF COWEN

June 22nd - October 13th, 2024

Following the success of his debut exhibition at Huis Marseille in 2017, Jeff Cowen’s (b. 1966 in New York) second exhibition opens at the museum in June. The exhibition features works that Cowen has created over the past few years, inspired by the Provence region in the South of France. Fascinated by the brilliant light and overwhelming nature, he captures his reflections with his poetic approach in this new body of work.

Analogue craftsmanship and experiment

In a world dominated by digital screens, technology, speed and overproduction, Cowen seeks to draw our attention to the sublime experience of nature’s beauty through his work. As a photographic artist, he keeps well away from the digital world and has a real hands-on approach to the craftsmanship of the photographic process. He uses self-made enlargers to create large analog prints on thick, wavy photographic paper. He experiments with darkroom techniques and chemical formulas, rendering each print a unique work.

While his photography encompasses all the traditional art historical genres, such as still life, landscape and portraiture, the alchemy in the darkroom during manual printing plays an important role, and in some works, abstraction takes over.

The Light of Provence

His working practices and the final result of Provence Works also make one think of painting. In the past, renowned artists such as Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh chose the region as a subject. The aesthetic of melancholy and the closeness with nature that they painted is also palpable in Cowen’s work. After years as a nomadic artist living and working in metropolises such as New York, Berlin and Paris, Cowen turned his lens to the Provençal terrain. The intensity of the mountainous landscape, the power of a simple artichoke, the vastness, and the often fiercely blue sky provide him with inspiration from nature in the same way as they did for Cézanne and Van Gogh. Through this work, he aligns himself with the artists who were able to translate their inspiration drawn from Provence into their art.

Cooperation between Huis Marseille and the Van Gogh Museum

Huis Marseille and the Van Gogh Museum will be participating in a special joint effort for this exhibition. Parallel to the exhibition at Huis Marseille, the Van Gogh Museum will present a small group of works by Jeff Cowen in their permanent display, alongside drawings and paintings that Van Gogh produced while in Provence.

Link to Huis Marseille Museum of Photography

Link to The Van Gogh Museum

Fotografiska Stockholm presents JEFF COWEN - BERLIN WORKS

May 17th - September 8th 2024

Jeff Cowen’s inaugural exhibition in Sweden offers a fascinating look into his transformative Berlin years. The artist is internationally renowned for his intricate painterly photoworks that captivate the senses and push the boundaries of photographic convention. The exhibition presents more than 100 handmade silver gelatin prints, showcasing Cowen’s innovative art.

On May 17, Jeff Cowen’s exhibition Berlin Works opens at Fotografiska Stockholm. Cowen was born and raised in New York City. He has devoted himself to photography since the 1980s, when he was working as a taxi driver while getting a degree at New York University. After living in Paris from 2001 to 2007, Cowen moved his studio and laboratory to Kreuzberg in Berlin, where his unique visual language underwent a period of intense development. The collection of art on view in the Berlin Works exhibition provides a representative survey of his Berlin period, which continued until 2023.

"BRIDGES THE VISIBLE WITH THE INVISIBLE, AND THE PRESENT WITH THE PAST."

Cowen’s work explores the evolutionary potential of the photographic medium by mating the power of painting with the power of photography. His art borders on the intersection between reality and Surrealism, bridging the visible with the invisible, and the present with the past.

"Here we are given an up-close experience of Cowen’s experimental approach, which leads to completely unique works", says Mohamed Mire, Exhibition Producer at Fotografiska Stockholm.

Working exclusively with analogue photography, Jeff Cowen often attacks his large format prints with various chemical procedures, mark-making, and brushwork, and they often include post-darkroom finishing techniques with painting and collage. His work is characterized by its three-dimensional, sculptural, and textural look.

“In troubled times, I believe art is a necessary reminder of the resilience of the human spirit. It is an honour to be able to show my work and share my love for the photographic medium here in Sweden and at Fotografiska,” says Jeff Cowen.

Berlin Works will be shown at Fotografiska Stockholm from May 17 to September 8. The exhibition is curated by Ellen K. Willas, and with Mohamed Mire as exhibition producer from Fotografiska.

The artworks are on generous loan from the MAP Collection Germany, which owns a significant body of work from Jeff Cowen’s Berlin period from 2007 to 2019.

HOUSE BERLIN REVIVED A HISTORIC 19TH CENTURY WILHELMINE BUILDING WITH ARTIST JEFF COWEN’S EXHIBITION SÉANCE

April 12 - June 2024

Cowen's photographs were presented as monumental sculptures, engaging with the venue's archival memory and in dialogue with works by artists such as Hans Bellmer, Joseph Beuys, Anna and Bernhard Blume, Claude Cahun, Sigmar Polke, and others.

Following a critically acclaimed inaugural exhibition Very friendly in 2023, Berlin-based art space HOUSE presented its second exhibition with the American artist Jeff Cowen following the theme of a ‘séance’. The show was on view from April 12 through June 2024, set in HOUSE’s historic venue, an unrenovated Wilhelmine building complex from the 19th century, with a former 40-meter-long shooting range as the main exhibition space. Understood as a metaphorical artistic dialogue between the artist and the past, Séance featured fourteen works placed on custom-made steel monoliths appearing as monumental sculptures, surrounded by additional artists’ pieces as a reference to Cowen’s works, including Hans Bellmer, Joseph Beuys, Anna und Bernhard Blume, Claude Cahun, Germaine Dulac, Albert Leo Peil, Sigmar Polke, Margaret Raspé, (a.o.) and anonymous artists. Curators: Juliet Kothe and Georgina Pope.

Press release on SÉANCE at HOUSE, Berlin

link to web site: HOUSE.BERLIN