David Krut Projects is pleased to present City of remembered futures, an exhibition of new drawings and unique lithographic works on paper by Peter Cohen. As a practicing architect, Cohen has an affinity for the built environment, with the relationship between the artificial and the natural, and populace and place, foremost questions in his practice. City of remembered futures explores the disconnect between notions of utopian and dystopian cities, and what emerges from the imagery is a sense of both the tension and harmony between natural elements and concrete counterparts.

While there is a very strong architectural presence, the images of place is devoid of people and rather relies, as in City of stolen voices, on the imagery of structures. The idea was to make these imaginary cities able to function on their own, without people, and so although there is a sense of extreme silence, there is also a sense of life that the cities create for themselves.

The starting point for this body of work was initially sparked by Cohen’s desire to return to drawing, to enjoy both some freedom in movement and accuracy in mark-making. In reference to places outside of the city scape, Cohen has created ‘split landscapes’ that are not connected by space or time but exist together in one work. These more natural scenes remain both connected and unconnected to the urban, separate but intertwined. Notions of place and space are often focused on urban environments, with landscape regarded as ‘vacant’ space, the ‘in between’ space. City of remembered futures shifts the lens to focus on open landscapes as place, with the cities being spaces that exist in between, subverting our notions of where ‘place’ should be.

Returning to David Krut Workshop and working with collaborator Sarah Judge, Peter was inspired to further explore overlaying and junctures between different worlds so to speak. The idea of the ‘split landscape’ evolved into a drawn mirrored imagery printed on top of each other and different sized plates to construct a fractured but relational scene. Cohen also introduced photographic material from his personal archive. Through layering urban and natural landscapes, what emerged was an almost poetic visual language that allows the city to breathe.