I see my artworks as multidimensional/multifaceted. In my art, I aspire to capture the simultaneous experience of being. Something that can exist in art, but I feel can never be fully expressed in text, due to the linear nature of language. Nevertheless, I will try. I paint and make art nonstop throughout most of the day. My art is an internal conversation with myself, as well as an ongoing dialogue with art and its complexity. Material, form, content, and image – all come together in artworks that are multilayered and rich. Sometimes like an erupting geyser – an explosion or torrent, though not one of destruction but rather a force of flow, growth, and vitality. My works follow several predominant styles, in which there is an ever-shifting balance between shape and line and between image and abstraction. For me, the image is formed from a subconscious tangle, while at the same time, it also disintegrates into that abstract tangle. On the one hand, I feel that painting leads me and to a large extent also reveals itself before me. On the other hand, I have created entire series based on research I conducted on various writers, musicians, questions of gender, and more.

Gili Cohen was born in 1968, and lives and work in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel. She holds a bachelor degree in Fine Art from the University of Haifa (1994), and studied in several private frameworks with prominent Israeli artists. Cohen works predominantly with painting and drawing in mixed media on various surfaces, alongside staged but untamed photography. Her works are an explosion of color and lines, woven into a powerful force of nature. This is an expanding tangle of figurative shapes that become abstract and vice versa. Her works contain figurative references to the presence of a body or different elements drawn from nature and culture.

Gili Cohen’s works are an explosion of color and lines, woven into a powerful force of nature. An expanding tangle of figurative shapes that become abstract and vice versa. Imbued with an endless movement of contraction and explosion, they simulate diffusion processes of osmosis and fusion. Her works, which hold figurative references, allude to the presence of a body or various elements drawn from nature. In all of them, categories are fluid: the landscape becomes a figure, which turns into colors and lines and back again. An endless process of movement that we experience when it is paused, as a frozen point in time. The painting, comprised of a stratified web of layers of paint and various textures, wishes to form a perspective on human reality: both external and emotional observation. The aspect of a mental pulse is manifested as abstract painting with changing temperaments. In most of her works, there is a constant struggle between a cold and a warm color palette and between the creation of a shape and its erasure and destruction. It is unclear whether the figures and landscapes that appear before us will disintegrate at any moment into the chaos of particles, or alternately, take shape and be immortalized as complete figures. And so, the viewer cannot look at Gili Cohen’s works in a state of calmness alone – they invite him on a journey and an adventure, trying to evoke his imagination and all of his senses. This is a viewing experience that demands of us to go back to the primal state of a looking and questioning child. As such, it prefers surrender and connection over knowledge and cerebral understanding.