My Second Home: Köln

In April 1996, Cohen went to Europe to live and work. She had always been drawn to Central and Northern European painting, and in contemporary art—especially painting—there seemed a freedom and license in Germany to be and do whatever one wanted. She rented a studio in Cologne (which she always referred to by its German name, Köln), used it as a base for extended viewing and working in Europe, and from then onward came to regard Köln a second home. The two places—entirely different in every way—formed the base of her life, and she began making drawings and photographs to reflect the psychological and physical spaces of both places.

From “Köln”
by Cora Cohen

“In April of 1996, I went to Europe to live and work. New York had become predictable in its busyness and its values, and I was also discouraged by this country on political and social levels. It was also an opportunity: I wouldn’t have gone without the art. I had been influenced by Joseph Beuys from the time he visited America in the early 1970s, and by the works of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke in the ’80s. I wanted to see the work of Wols, Jean Fautrier, and European abstraction in general, which was not possible in the United States. I came to visit wonderful places not only in or near Köln but all over Germany: established institutions as well as small museums dedicated to a single artist, like the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl. Or a place like Insel Hombroich, a former NATO base between Düsseldorf and Köln, where eventually, in 2011, I had the opportunity to work.”

“Germany in general, and in particular in the Köln/Düsseldorf region, values art: people there like their art, and I liked that reinforcement, the seriousness of people, their quiet determination. Köln has a neutrality that other cities in Germany don’t have, and that neutrality allowed me to change and grow. I found myself wanting to spend time with work that had more immediate handling, work that had a greater emotive resonance and even a psychological pull. It soon began to feel like my second home, and after 1996 I divided my time between Köln and New York.”

“While they were entirely different from each other in every way—geographically, physically, culturally, socially—they now formed the base of my life. I began making drawings and photographs to reflect the psychological and physical spaces of both places, to grasp their differences and stabilize myself. 10-98 New York / Köln (1998) is a mapping of my daily bicycle commute in Köln from my home to my studio, delineating my route in keeping with the ring configuration of this old Roman city, laid over an earlier, erased drawing based on New York City’s grid configuration. In much the same way, my photographs annotate and comment on aspects of my daily life that I would otherwise forget or neglect: my complex responses as an American Jew of Russian immigrant heritage to sectors like Hansaring—rebuilt cheaply in haste—(which) have memorials to those tortured and killed shown alongside the visual, hedonistic Rhineland culture. These photographs serve as my form of resistance to a dominant culture, despite its attractiveness.”

RELATED DOCUMENTS

Stephen Maine, “Keeping it Real,” Abaton Garage, Jersey City, New Jersey, September 2007

Cora Cohen and Manfred Engeser, “220724 Engeser Interview Cologne,” unpublished document, 2022

Cora Cohen, “Köln” (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2026)