Aaron Benjamin Cohen (b. 1995, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a mixed media artist whose practice moves between painting, sculpture, and salvage. Working across traditional canvas and constructed surfaces, Benjamin Cohen uses discarded plexiglass, paper, plastic, collected advertisements, and other found materials alongside conventional painting supports. Through cutting, sanding, fusing, layering, and partial erasure, he allows fragments of these materials’ previous lives to remain visible when they enter the work.
His paintings examine threshold states in which figures, memories, and social roles remain unsettled. Figures often emerge through accumulated layers rather than appearing as fixed or fully resolved subjects. Painted passages coexist with exposed drawing, printed imagery, damaged surfaces, and salvaged ephemera, creating tension between physical presence and disappearance. Advertising imagery frequently enters the work as a quiet record of the commercial systems that shape daily life, desire, and perception.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Benjamin Cohen attended the University of the Arts before continuing his practice independently. He later spent a year living and working in Mexico City, where he began experimenting more extensively with discarded materials. During this period, he flattened and bonded plastic water bottles into painting surfaces, an intuitive response to resourcefulness, material excess, and the conditions of his immediate environment. This experimentation established the foundation for his ongoing investigation into the relationship between surface, image, and narrative.
Benjamin Cohen is currently based in New York City. His recent work moves between paintings on canvas and layered figurative surfaces built from salvaged materials, treating construction, revision, and sustained attention as central parts of the painting process.