Exhibition Poster, Tate Gallery, 1983

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Harold Cohen

1983

15"x20"

Description

Three documents in the collection represent the two distinct phases of Harold Cohen’s career, from his beginnings as an abstract painter to his pioneering work with artificial intelligence.

The Robert Fraser Gallery catalogue was produced to accompany Cohen’s solo show, his second at the London gallery, in September–October 1963. In a short text printed in the catalogue, the artist reflects on the nature of painting. For Cohen, like many other artists of the time, abstraction was a means to interrogate and understand his chosen medium.

Two decades later, his focus had shifted drastically, as demonstrated by the 1983 poster for his exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London—a show of drawings generated by the computer software AARON and robotically executed in front of visitors—and The First Artificial Intelligence Coloring Book (1983). This is the first edition of the book, which Cohen wrote together with his wife Becky Cohen and the AI researcher Penny Nii.