The subject of Alex Bradley Cohen’s work is his everyday life, and he often intimately portrays his friends. Place #1 developed first as a drawing alongside a recent body of paintings in which Cohen examined the social dynamics of life in his Chicago neighborhood. Depicting moments that are intimate and collective, Cohen frames people working and socializing within the city itself: here El tracks and subway tile envelop the artist, who is seated with a friend.

Cohen is known for buoyantly colorful painting, but in this etching, color is profoundly absent. Black lines, rather, are what orchestrate one’s gaze continuously from figure to ground, cutting across the picture plane in ways that both connect and gracefully contort. This symbolically represents the relational yet dialectic quality of life in cities: in a sense, we are in solidarity and everything is connected, but yet we are also fragmented. These divisions–both physical and emotional–are both of our own making and thrust upon us.

Cohen, however, is mostly focused on moments where intimacies are shared. As the Jewish Museum’s Liz Munsell wrote upon a recent acquisition, “It is the viewer’s extreme privilege to be let into this intimate conversation, which unfolds through Cohen’s keen sensitivity and generosity.”