Born 1928, London.

Harold Cohen served in the RAF from 1946-48. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1948-52. In 1952 he won an Abbey Travelling Scholarship and went to Italy. He taught art history at Camberwell School of Art in London for two years and then mathematics at a preparatory school. From 1956-59 he was the first Fellow in Fine Arts at Nottingham University and had numerous one-person exhibitions. He won a Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship to New York from 1959-61 where he had an exhibition at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York.

He was selected for the Paris Biennale in 1959 and the Tokyo Biennale in 1963. He contributed to the Situation exhibition held in London in 1960 which featured the work of twenty artists who made large scale abstract paintings and was one of Five Young British Artists in the Venice Biennale of 1966. He has taught at St Martin's, Bromley and Ealing Art Schools, and at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Trained as a mathematician and craftsman, in 1963 he was already considering the implications of computer technology.  In 1968 Cohen accepted a one year visiting professorship at the University of California which led to a complete change in his career. Within a few days he became interested in computers and his subsequent works have been computer inspired and generated.  He now works largely with computers at Stanford University.

Red Central