ABOUT

When Drea Cofield basks in water, there is an intensification of color, refraction; a deepening. Water fills all holes and also reflects the surrounding world, creating a kaleidoscopic experience that is sensual and psychedelic. Water itself is the content and container for much of Cofield’s work. It encases, it drips, it caresses, it carries scent and rides warm air, then ripples into patterns. It connects and reflects and resides within absorbent bodies.

Cofield’s work flows freely between the imagined and the observed. Painting outside alla prima has fine-tuned and heightened her relationship to color, movement, and life. It has also fleshed out her understanding of desire and its position within the narrative scope of her paintings. Desire exists in the mind as movement, the journey, the moment before touching - the space beyond. Always tantamount is the importance of looking; how color operates in relationship to the physics of sight and light, and how it is used as a means of seduction in the natural world. The landscape behaves as subject, frame, and referent. In this regard also is the aperture, the thing that seeks and captures the gaze: a sun setting, a nipple, the stamen of a hibiscus. Imagination weaves in and around these subjects through juxtaposition and invention. They are forms and moments chosen from Cofield’s life. She has experienced them with her eyes and her body. They are organized by her relationships, humor, and desires. Within this narrative of making, you see form tenderly rendered then dissolving into painted marks on surface. Puns play out in their turn. The paintings are best viewed with slow, tracing and lingering looks.

Drea Cofield is an artist currently working in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited widely including New York, Dallas, Detroit and Los Angeles with recent solo exhibitions at Galleri Urbane in Dallas, TX and Future Fair in Chelsea, NY. Upcoming shows include Heaven Gallery in Chicago, IL and a two-person show at Kravets Wehby in NYC in September 2024. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, WhiteHot Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and Contemporary Painting (World of Art). She is the recipient of a Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and the Yale Gloucester Painting Prize. Residencies include a Yaddo Residency in Saratoga Springs, NY, in 2023. Cofield received her B.A. from DePauw University (Greencastle, IN) in 2008 and her M.F.A from Yale School of Art (New Haven, CT), in 2013.