Heartbeats 1990

Roman Cotosman made this abstract print called “Heartbeats,” sometime between 1960 and 2000, using an inking technique of some kind. Its serial squares, evenly spaced, could evoke the regularity of institutional architecture or the repetitious character of labor under an industrialized regime. Cotosman was born in Romania and eventually emigrated to Israel. Given this, it’s tempting to view “Heartbeats” as responding to the cultural politics of the Eastern Bloc, where abstract art was often viewed as subversive because it evaded socialist realism. The more we know about an artist’s institutional settings, the better we can interpret their work. We might consult exhibition reviews to understand how Cotosman’s art was received, or delve into archives to discover his written statements about it.