Double

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Harold Cohen

1963

Painting

NotAComputer

Description

Harold Cohen’s Double is a representative work from the artist’s early career as an abstract painter, before he turned to programming in 1968.

At the time, Cohen was working as a lecturer in painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he had trained from 1948–52. Unlike many of his peers in the UK, he was strongly drawn to the trend for abstraction that dominated painting in the US at the time.

Double is an oil on canvas. Its curving, tube-like shapes are a recurring motif in his canvases from this period. Cohen once explained that he was trying to find a visual metaphor for the working of the human mind, with forms echoing the anatomy of the brain. They have also been compared to computer wiring, presaging Cohen’s later turn to technology.