To Be Here

Joseph Cohen: To Be Here
Solo Exhibition at Friedrichs Pontone, Tribeca

Opening: October 9
On View: Through November 14

“These paintings are not proclamations but records of showing up, layer after layer, mark after mark: evidence of a decision to participate in the world rather than merely comment on it. I am interested in that hinge where restless making yields an experience of stillness, and where stillness, in turn, reveals the effort that produced it.”
- Joseph Cohen

We’re excited to share that artist Joseph Cohen is opening his new solo exhibition, To Be Here, at Friedrichs Pontone in Tribeca — and the work on display stems directly from more than a decade of collaboration between Joseph and Daniel Heller.

What began as a shared investigation into materials and perception evolved into something neither an artist nor a scientist working independently would likely have arrived at. Working alongside the Heller Lab, Joseph began incorporating separated carbon nanotubes into paint, harnessing their near-infrared optical properties to create artworks that contain information beyond the limits of ordinary human vision. In turn, translating these nanomaterials into a stable, paintable medium contributed to our own research.

That exchange became part of published scientific work. In 2019, Joseph joined the Heller Lab as a co-author on a paper in Nature Communications describing a carbon-nanotube nanosensor paint capable of detecting microalbuminuria in clinical patient samples — a biomarker associated with conditions such as cancer, diabetes, and hypertension. It stands as a remarkable example of what can happen when disciplines are allowed to meet without a predetermined outcome.

The paintings in To Be Here carry that history forward while moving well beyond a mere illustration of science. The new works bring together painting, materials science, and optics, using materials such as separated carbon nanotubes and quantum dots to explore questions of attention, duration, presence, and the relationship between what we can see and what lies beyond our perception.

Joseph would be especially grateful to welcome members of the MSK community to the exhibition. He is also happy to personally guide visitors through the paintings — their surfaces and optical behavior are difficult to fully grasp in reproduction, and experiencing them in person is an important part of understanding the work.