selected press
blouin artinfo // "orly cogan's irreverent take on femininity"
Artist Orly Cogan discusses her irreverent take on the conventions of femininity through the embroidery of stitched figures on dainty vintage fabrics.
feminartist // "orly cogan & her personal mythologies"
Orly Cogan is an artist based in New York who works primarily in textiles, using found tablecloths as a canvas. Her intimate, story-like pieces seek to challenge feminine archetypes - drug and cake consumption are some of the unsuspected gems that hide in plain sight within the girlish patterns. Evolving "from the personal mythology of my memories", her use of vintage fabrics extend this mythology back to women in previous generations and give her work a thought-provoking collaborative aspect.
mr. stitch // "Future heirlooms"
Today’s Future Heirlooms interview is with the incredibly talented artist Orly Cogan. You kind of have to have been living under a rock to not know her gorgeous layered figurative embroideries. Orly lets us into her practice and inspiration in this interview and gives us a nice long list of artists that inspire her, some good names to look up. When I first saw Orly’s work at the incredible exhibit, Pricked: Extreme Embroidery at the Museum of Arts and Design in NY I immediately loved and related to it- we both are connected to and use found vintage linens and work autobiographically. It took me a few years to further research her work but the more I did the more I enjoyed it.
mr. stitch // "The Cutting & Stitching edge"
Orly revitalises vintage fabrics with her hand embroideries, spinning contemporary vignettes that mix the erotic with the mundane and create little bits of magic. Her works breathe life back into fabrics and existing embroideries in remarkable ways, and yet the old and the new end up looking as though they were always meant to be that way. Her work evokes memories of Alice Through The Looking Glass, of The Joy of Sex (!), of mystical worlds and private moments between lovers. Truly remarkable.
artblog // "a girlie's nudes"
The embroidered nudes of Orly Cogan have it both ways. They express the artist’s exuberant self-possession of her own body in circumstances that are clearly of this moment in time (with cellphones, hair dryers, current clothing styles, etc.). But they refer copiously to the history–art history and archetypal fairy tale roles–of women objectified. So Cogan gets to have her cupcake and eat it, too, by icing her feminist perspective with a little titillation.
Daily serving // "not quite beauty"
Orly Cogan is searching for the feminist beauty queen. Her strategy involves backtracking, returning to the same matronly craftiness embraced by members of Womanhouse a quarter of a century ago. That’s only sensible. Beauty queens and “the cutting-edge” do not go hand-in-hand. Case in point: this year’s freshly crowned Miss USA may have been the first Arab-American to take the title and the first to unwittingly promote birth control for all, but she still won viewers’ affection with a by-the-bootstraps story—she sold her car to pay for her dream—and still looked like a small-town prom queen in her strapless, wedding-white evening gown. Cogan’s work, in which figures rarely wear gowns if they wear anything at all, does not have the Horatio-Alger-style gumption of Miss USA but it has a homegrown wholesomeness that even its narrative deviance can’t suppress. Its crafty, colorful stitching seems better suited to a 4-H booth at the county fair than a white-walled art space.
LA times // orly cogan at charlie james gallery
...what resonates in the show at Charlie James is Cogan's exuberant faith in sensual indulgence. Her stitchery turns up on baby blankets, vintage printed fabric, doilies and kitchen tablecloths. It depicts images with overtones both religious and pagan -- Eve lolling in the Garden, nymphs fondling frogs who may (or may not) be princes, Mom vacuuming the den in the nude.