The Executive Apartments

A foreboding wooden desk stands before a mural depicting a tranquil body of water. For more than forty years, Lynne Cohen sought to represent the “strangeness, incoherence, and sadness” of anonymous interiors in the United States and Canada. Though they never include people, her photographs hold latent drama.Beginning in the 1970s with domestic interiors and showrooms, Cohen shifted her focus over the following two decades to military installations, laboratories, and police training academies, as seen in photographs nearby. These works also show how the artist changed her choice of media from black-and-white contact prints to enlargements, often framed in the plastic compound Formica, and finally to color prints starting in the late 1990s.