Aspire Art

The Archive of Lost Instructions

The solo exhibition by Peter Cohen proposes that we have inherited the world, but not necessarily the instructions for understanding it. 

The works behave like pages from a book whose organising logic has been partially lost. Familiar images appear —flowers, figures, portraits, landscapes, architectural forms—but they are encountered in states of reconstruction. They emerge through layers of systems, fragments, diagrams, grids, marks and interruptions. The viewer is presented not with a complete image, but with evidence of the processes through which images are assembled. 

The “Archive” in the title is a metaphor for the accumulated knowledge, systems and structures that shape how we interpret the world. The “lost instructions” are the missing pieces that once explained how those systems fit together. Traces of structure remain visible throughout the work – architectural frameworks, geometrical divisions, dot fields, repeated mark systems – but the complete set of instructions is unavailable. Meaning must be assembled from what survives. 

The works gather fragments, organise information and propose new relationships between disparate elements, yet they never fully resolve into a single authoritative description. Something always remains incomplete, obscured or uncertain – not as a failure, but as a condition. 

The exhibition is not about nostalgia or recovery. It is about what happens when the systems that once promised clarity have become fragmented, contradictory or incomplete, and how we continue to construct understanding in their absence. 

Peter Cohen is a Johannesburg-based artist whose practice explores the instability of representation through layered systems of drawing, painting, printmaking and material construction. Working across abstraction and figuration, his works investigate how images emerge, dissolve and reform through processes of accumulation, interruption and erasure.

Cohen works with an unusually wide range of materials and surfaces, and his early paintings — made on found supports such as floorboards and heavy brown paper — established a sensibility of precision and material attentiveness that continues to run through the work. In more recent works, this logic extends beyond the canvas. Layers of glue and paint are built up and then lifted away from their support, forming a physical structure that becomes the work itself. Here, the material no longer sits on a ground — it is the ground. The image exists as a suspended skin, dependent on light and space, shifting between painting and object.

Since 2022, Cohen has developed an expanding print-based practice through his ongoing collaboration with the David Krut Workshop (DKW). Working with the collaborating printers, Cohen has produced monotypes, lithographs, cyanotypes and large-scale linocuts — work presented in exhibitions including Colour in Black and White  (2022) and City of Remembered Futures (2023) at David Krut Projects, Johannesburg, and at the David Krut Projects booth at the Brooklyn Art Fair, New York in 2025.