Georgina Cohen has a reputation as a thoughtful gift giver. To memorialize the passing of a friend’s father, she commissioned Joel Mesler to paint his name in the artist’s trademark balloon lettering, alongside ribbons spelling out the names of his wife and nine children. The painting’s recipient, Irish hotelier Paddy McKillen, was so moved that he invited Mesler to show at Château La Coste, the temple to art, architecture, and wine he opened in Provence in 2011.
Cohen has turned these kinds of connections into a calling. The London-based Gagosian director and collector helped instigate the exhibition “Rashid, Sheree and Friends,” which opens on July 5 and brings work by the former artist couple’s creative community to the storied 600-acre estate. Johnson and Hovsepian will concurrently take over two other spaces in the Château with solo presentations.
For the occasion, Hovsepian is making her most ambitious sculptures to date, eight-foot-tall bronze figures (“pregnant Giacomettis, as she calls them,” Cohen notes). Alongside paintings and a video featuring three generations of his family, Johnson will exhibit a custom bronze table whose almond shape recalls a frequent motif in his canvases. “He wanted to create a space that would bring people together,” Cohen says.
Art has always been a communal affair for Cohen. The daughter of prolific British collector Frank Cohen, she grew up in an art-filled home and was recruited by none other than Larry Gagosian himself in 2006. (She’d been introduced by her brother, former Gagosian director Adam Cohen, who now runs the boutique New York gallery A Hug From the Art World.) Over the next 20 years, Cohen quickly transitioned from running PR and events to mounting special artist projects and advising collectors. Her career at the mega-gallery has coincided with a profound expansion of the industry. “It’s almost become too big for itself,” Cohen says. “When I started, everything felt much more personal.”
The intimacy of a bygone art world is what Cohen tries to preserve in her work and at home. Her walls are hung with art by friends, including Mesler, the married artists Annie Morris and Idris Khan, and Michael Craig-Martin, who will be the subject of a show at Château La Coste next March. Since curating her first shows at the property in 2022, it’s become a very sentimental place, Cohen reasons, “like a home away from home.”
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