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 in the U.S. and internationally including New York, Dallas, Miami Los Angeles, and Italy with recent solo exhibitions at Galleri Urbane, October 2023, Untitled Miami, Galleri Urbane, DePauw University in Greencastle, IN, and Exeter Gallery in Baltimore, MD. Upcoming shows include Future Fair, NY solo booth presentation, Heaven Gallery in Chicago, IL and Library Street Collective in Detroit, MI. Her work has been featured in the Brooklyn Rail, Artnet News, Juxtapoz, and Contemporary Painting (World of Art). She is the recipient of an Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and the Yale Gloucester Painting Prize. Residencies include the Guild of Adventure Painters Mobile Residency in 2019 and a Yaddo Residency in Saratoga Springs, NY, in 2023. She is the Founder and Director of Bomb Pop-Up, a pop-up art and music initiative that focuses on providing visibility in exciting contexts to emerging and established artists and musicians. 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.