HAROLD COHEN (1928-2016)
Untitled (i23-3758)
ink on paper
paper size: 22 1/4 x 30 in. (56.5 x 76.2 cm)
Executed in 1987

Gazelli Art House, London, 2025

In the late 1960s, Harold Cohen developed AARON, an early AI program that reinterpreted his sketches. Created in 1987, Untitled (i23-3758) is a key work from Harold Cohen's pivotal Drawing Machine era, belonging to the celebrated Jungle Drawing series, a subset of the broader Eden Series. By the late 1980’s AARON entered its fourth phase where human figures were built upon a three-dimensional knowledge base of the program. This series marked an important evolution in Cohen's practice, generating complex compositions of human figures with foliage motifs that had appeared in his work since the early 1980s. Using AARON, his groundbreaking autonomous art-making program, Cohen algorithmically prompted the generation of forms in a sophisticated space, resulting in dramatically positioned figures stepping out of a complex jungle environment. The plants are generated from a number of sophisticated rules about morphology in terms of branching level, clustering patterns in leaf formations, and plant size. The energy and rhythm of the composition demonstrate Cohen’s continued exploration of how AI could emulate and innovate artistic expression. Cohen was recently the subject of a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2024.

Certified by Verisart.