Jeff Cowen

En Plein Air

Opening Tuesday 17th March 2026

at Sotheran’s Athenaeum

CLICK HERE to request the exhibition catalogue

CASSIUS&Co. is pleased to announce Jeff Cowen: En Plein Air, the gallery’s second solo presentation of the artist and its third at Sotheran’s Athenaeum. The exhibition will open on Tuesday 17th March 2026, at Sotheran’s, 22 Charing Cross Road, London, WC2H 0HS.

En Plein Air brings together eight new works based on the landscape of Provence, where Cowen has lived since 2023. It is a landscape loaded with a history of images, loomed over by the same Mont Saint-Victoire so religiously painted by Cézanne, the same cypresses and olive trees made maniacal by Van Gogh, the same azures of the sky and sea that appear in the work of Matisse, Picasso, Yves Klein, and many others. The title En Plein Air refers both to the historical practice of working outside, as well as to the alchemy of photography, in which images only emerge on paper when it is exposed to the open air.

Cowen expands the canon based on this landscape in both material and expressionistic terms. His practice of tearing, collaging, burning and writing, as well as the painterly application of chemicals to photographic images, makes for objects that resist classification and which provide a febrile ground for expressivity. Here the radiance of the sun is a herald of gold over fields of lettering like waves, the lumbering of a cloud seems about to crack the very fabric of the paper it is printed on. Here matter is made poetic in a visceral and eloquent way, and passions are made physical without sentiment. A collection of French literature will be presented alongside the works at Sotheran’s Athenaeum.

Jeff Cowen (b. 1966, New York) has a scholarly background in East Asian studies. His first photographic series West 14th Street, which documented the lives of the transgender sex workers who lived in his neighbourhood, was acquired by the New York Historical Society. He then worked as a studio assistant to Larry Clark, and in the 1990s studied academic drawing and painting at the Art Students League and New York Studio School. His works have been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bremerhaven, Germany, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Museum of Modern Art, Tbilisi and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow. In 2021 he was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Grant for Fine Art Still Photography, and in 2024 presented his latest project, Provence Works, simultaneously at the Huis Marseille Museum of Photography and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.