Kevin Cobb
Optic Nerve
November 15–December 21, 2025
Opening reception Saturday, November 15, 3-5 PM
TURLEY is pleased to announce Optic Nerve, Kevin Cobb’s first solo-exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition includes a series of oil paintings, works on paper, and digital works by the New York City-based artist. Cobb’s paintings explore the distortions of the digital world and the physicality of one’s perspective—the exhibition title references this physical process. The optic nerve is the second pair of cranial nerves, through millions of nerve fibers at the back of one’s retina images pass through a one way channel and are processed in the brain. Paintings like Spatium Interiorem render this process, with the 60 inch tondo positioning the viewer somewhere behind Cobb’s retina as he works on the painting.
The vantage point for each painting is an essential component of the work, RainbowPumpkin also places the viewer within Cobb’s eyeballs, with the image border being surrounded behind the artist’s eyelids. The focus on interior perspective includes the fragments of our visual scope that our brain learns to ignore—the tip of our nose, the arch of our cheek, the curve of our eyelashes. With careful consideration, Cobb expands the still life to include his own body.
Ekstasis includes a vision of the artist as a hieroglyph–the flattened perspective of this Egyptian tradition stands in contrast to the omnipotent perspective of the image. As with the hieroglyph, there are also numerous spiritual, mystical threads innate to Cobb’s work. Latin titles, bible verses, and Egyptian iconography place the physical distortions within a metaphysical framework. As with shifting the perspective corporeally inside one’s head, this conceptual framework for the work shifts the perspective along a more abstract plane, somewhere far beyond the optic nerve.
—Peter Kelly
Kevin Cobb, Spatium Interiorem, 2024, oil on panel, 59.5 x 59.5 x 1 inches
Kevin Cobb
My art is concerned with vision, perspective, and illusion, especially as they relate to self-consciousness, spiritual realization, and surveillance. My fascination with spherical perspective, circular motifs, and the first-person point of view grew from my engagement with religion, spirituality, and mindfulness. Like the circle and sphere, these practices serve as symbols of holism and rootedness in the present, with the viewer or subject imagined as the emblematic dot within the circle.
In ways that feel particularly potent today, I am compelled to process myself through external models of my own making: those generated by the surveilling, algorithmic logics of the internet, the market, and popular culture. They are deeply embedded in my mind, like a new kind of Super-Ego or cyber double-consciousness. My visual language is shaped by a screen-saturated life, always aware of myself, the frame of the screen that distinguishes a game or show from its context, and the shifting viewpoint of the avatar or protagonist. I see digital technology, especially 3D modeling, as a means of expanding perception and extending the field of vision beyond what is otherwise possible, which is why I integrate it deeply into my practice.
My current body of work is a meditation on self-awareness, reflection, and the mystery of objectivity. It is a journey inward and outward at once, seeking more inclusive and truthful ways of seeing.
Kevin Cobb, Strike the Rock, 2024, ink on paper, 16 x 16 x 1 inches
KEVIN COBB (b. 1994 in Baltimore, MD) is a painter and digital artist based in New York City, where he lives with his brilliant wife. He received his HSD from the Carver Center for Arts and Technology, his BFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art, and his MFA from Columbia University. His work has been exhibited internationally and has won several awards.