Concerning the Meal 1980

Bernard Cohen made "Concerning the Meal" in London at some point, and he used printmaking. I can only imagine the slow process of layering up the colours with screens. When I look at this, I think of a quilt, or maybe a stained glass window. It's abstract but there's something very domestic about it. Cohen probably wants you to look closely at the surface. See how the red ink creates a grid, inside these we can see abstract symbols which become something akin to lettering. The transparent red shapes sit on top of the gridded ground, and some green and blue ones too. They feel light and airy, like jelly sweets floating above this landscape. I wonder what Cohen was thinking about when he made this? Did he want to create a game-like piece, or maybe a coded map of something? Cohen is part of a long conversation about abstraction and his work encourages us to look at the world in new and unexpected ways.