orly cogan:
behind the lens & through the Needle
September 10 - October 24, 2026
PRESS RELEASE | images
Stitching Schiele, 2021 The Last Look, 2026
Opening Reception: September 10, 2026
Celebrating our 35th year and kicking off the fall season in our newly constructed gallery space on the fourth floor of the famed West Chelsea Arts Building we are pleased to present: Orly Cogan: Behind the Lens & Through the Needle.
Long celebrated for her hand-stitched feminist embroidery artwork, Orly Cogan debuts a compelling new body of work that expands her distinctive practice by bringing photography and fiber art into a whimsical, imaginative dialogue.
Through needle and thread, she reveals the hidden energies embedded within works of art and the spaces in which they are displayed. By calling forth magical worlds concealed within art fairs, galleries, and museums, Cogan suggests that the act of viewing art can itself become a creative act.
Nature weaves through many of these works in lush bouquets of blossoms, where black-and-white imagery merges with intricate embroidery and richly layered three dimensional textures. Hidden among the flowers and foliage are unexpected moments of wonder waiting to be discovered. With subtle nods to the art of dance and the rhythms of the natural world, these pieces exist between memory and imagination, carrying an ethereal sense of profusion in which the stitched and the photographed, the tangible and the dreamlike, intertwine.
Seen as a response to Susan Sontag’s suggestion that photographs are neat “slices” of the world forever frozen in time, Cogan’s hand and needle breathe life into pictures, an overtly feminine touch that yields a creative abundance, at times forcing the artworks to spill out of their frames. Cogan’s handwork, partnering with the mechanics of the photographic image, explores the tension between speed and slowness, reproduction and singularity. These works propose that meaning is not fixed within the image but emerges through encounter and engagement. It is within this space between photograph and thread, reality and invention, object and viewer, that the familiar is unsettled, allowing something unexpected to come vividly into being.
Orly Cogan and Robert Mann: Behind the Lens & Through the Needle
by: art spiel
Orly Cogan stitches, crochets, and paints directly onto photographs. Under her needle, figures loosen from their frames, and in some pieces the thread spills past the edge onto the floor. Her work on photographs owes much to twenty years alongside the photography dealer Robert Mann. The two met at an art fair, reconnected at a collector’s party, and had their first date in her studio talking about her work; across years of openings, fairs, and long studio hours since, each has shaped how the other looks. Cogan, trained as a painter, came to read a photograph as an object with its own history and materiality, while Mann, whose gallery was built on photography, became an advocate for embroidery and its feminist history. That shared education first reached his gallery walls in 2014.
Behind the Lens and Through the Needle gathers the work that grew from that exchange and opens Mann’s newly built West Chelsea space in his thirty-fifth year with a public gallery. In Cogan’s hands, the two mediums hold different kinds of time: the camera’s caught instant and the needle’s slow, cumulative one. The photograph gives her the frozen scene; the embroidery reopens it, adding labor, touch, and imagination until the captured moment seems to keep unfolding.
Read the full article.
Orly Cogan: Behind the Lens & Through the Needle | Robert Mann Gallery
By: Musée magazine
A beautiful combination of embroidery and photography, Robert Mann Gallery currently presents Behind the Lens & Through the Needle on view from September 10 until October 24. Artist Orly Cogan intricately fuses together both photography and needle work embroidery to explore themes of femininity, identity and craft. I was personally able to view this exhibition myself, and could see the richly layered world where stitched images and photographic prints combine to challenge traditional narratives surrounding women’s roles, sexuality, and creative expression. Read the full article.