Corydon Cowansage’s work explores both the psychology of space and the relationship between abstraction, architecture, biomorphic forms and the body itself. The artist uses geometry and vibrant color to manipulate light and shadow, distorting our perceptions of physical space—while reconstructing the viewer’s point of access to the painting. Cowansage’s meditative compositions reflect on the speed of the world and feature invented forms that are simultaneously recognizable and slightly removed from reality.

Corydon Cowansage uses banal forms to create surreal compositions that play with light, color, and the viewer’s perceptions. Her seemingly abstract paintings have their roots in the beauty of small everyday delights of the observed world, from architectural details to bodily forms. These referents are transformed through vibrant, hard-edge color and geometric pattern in lush canvases that reveal painterly handling upon close examination. Cowansage also plays with scale, often creating an uncanny, embodied experience for the viewer through the use of large canvases shown off the wall and other tricks of perspective. Corydon Cowansage received an MFA from RISD and a BA from Vassar College. She has participated in residencies at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Yale Norfolk School of Art. Her paintings have been exhibited most recently at Miller Gallery in New York, Deli Projects in Basel, The Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York, James Graham & Sons in New York, and Regina Rex in Brooklyn. In 2013 she was awarded the W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College. She lives and works in New York.

Corydon Cowansage’s disembodied forms evoke a sense of discomfort, stimulation, buoyancy, the maternal, and the sublime. Her fibrous shapes are suspended within the frame, forming a harnessed restraint that interacts with the wavy and bent bodies, as they come to a sharp, tantalizing point. There is a moment of pain, both uncomfortable and awkward, as plump, fleshy forms contort themselves into configurations or stretch out to just barely graze each other’s tingling tips. These articulations of structures sometimes find themselves duplicated, whether by a conscious decision or complete coincidence. The viewer is only allotted a particular crop of this vision, generating further delusions about the spatial nature of these objects, as they perpetually float and meld together within the confines of the substrate.   

Corydon Cowansage (b. 1985 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) lives and works in New York. she realized the Gucci Art Wall project in Miami’s design district, on the occasion of Art Basel Miami Beach 2024. she received an MFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 and a BA in art from Vassar College in 2008. She has participated in residencies at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Yale Norfolk School of Art. Cowansage’s work has been shown internationally with recent solo and group exhibitions in Belgium, Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom.