WOMEN!

Artist, director, and photographer, Nadia Lee Cohen has always worked immersed in pop culture. Cinema, advertising, shopping malls, and the sordid remnants of Western consumerism inspire her work, which then falls within the networks of mass media in the form of magazine covers, music videos, and Instagram posts. Born on a small farm isolated in the greenery of the English countryside, Lee Cohen began, with the help of her parents, to build sets for her early film and photography projects in the garage. Surrounded by artists – her mother painted some of the characters in the 1978 animated film Watership Down, and her uncle was a draftsman selected as a Playboy cartoonist in the early 1960s – she decided to move to Los Angeles in search of new material inspired by the Hollywood scene, only to discover that the real Hollywood Boulevard is made of sleazy neon lights and shattered dreams. This sad but raw reality becomes for the artist a new source of inspiration: her photographs and films are visions of dreamlike landscapes, saturated and surreal, capturing the overt pleasures and visceral terrors of the urban environment. In 2020, she published her first book – Women, now in a fanzine edition – an important monograph produced over six years of work, including over 100 unpublished portraits. A poignant work of theatrical ambiguity, naked in its honesty and profoundly moving: drawing on the duality of form and the female figure, Nadia Lee Cohen fixes our gaze on that twisted paradise hidden within her mind, exploring the paradoxical standoff between strength and fragility. The artist follows in the tradition of Cindy Sherman, Gillian Wearing, and Frida Kahlo, conceptualist women who have seen in the candor of self-portraiture an invitation to become someone else.

Cohen’s work presents a sharp outsider perspective on American culture, driven by perfection. It’s a theme that recurs in her images, honed by drawing from the iconography of 1960s and 1970s American suburbs: the artist uses the camera to subvert and challenge societal ideals, whether focused on beauty, wealth, femininity, or desirability in general. She creates characters who operate within the paradigm they were born into, but only on their own terms. Irreverence unleashes alongside a high level of self-awareness; she portrays figures who revel in their freedoms while understanding the artificial systems that imprison them. Invited to the most important events in the international creative panorama, Nadia Lee Cohen sits in the front row and presents herself. Or perhaps it seems so. If these personal appearances blur the lines between artist and celebrity, her self-portrait work certainly doesn’t: in Hello, My Name Is, published by IDEA in 2021, Nadia Lee Cohen manifests herself in 33 different characters. Obsessed with flea markets, dump auctions, and thrift stores, the artist gathered the identification cards of 33 unknown people and from these remains gave life to new characters, including Teena, a fan of Jane Birkin who smokes Marlboro Reds; Ivett, the melancholic casino dealer; Michael, the athlete who reads Playboy; and Diane, specializing in ear piercing. Each portrait in the book is accompanied by a full-page still life and objects that the artist acquired to add detail to her figures, such as the contents of a bag, a desk drawer, or a car’s glove compartment. Nadia herself is unrecognizable in many of the portraits: only the true character of the figure is visible. The project prompts a reflection: who is Nadia Lee Cohen not?