Ethan Cohen Gallery is pleased to present Take A Good Look, a solo exhibition of Renée Cox at the gallery’s 225 W 17th Street location in Chelsea. Bringing together works from the early 1990s through the present, the exhibition traces more than three decades of Cox’s uncompromising approach to photography, self-representation, and the politics of the image. The exhibition opens in conjunction with Ethan Cohen Gallery’s solo presentation of Cox at The Armory Show in New York.
Throughout her career, Cox has returned to a deceptively simple proposition: what changes when a Black woman places herself at the center of images from which she has historically been excluded? Cox has used her own body as both subject and instrument, inhabiting and remaking the visual languages of Western art history, Christianity, colonialism, popular culture, and national mythology. Her photographs are confrontational, but rarely only confrontational. They are also theatrical, formally exacting, humorous, sensual, and deeply invested in the possibility of making new images from inherited ones.