portfolio

For over twenty-five years, Orly Cogan has embroidered intimate worlds where surrealism, humor, and irony intertwine. Entirely hand-stitched, often on a large scale, her works use muted, gentle colors to draw viewers close before revealing layered narratives of gender, desire, and domestic life.

Cogan’s figures move between archetype and invention with princesses, heroines, and tricksters rendered vulnerable, playful, and fiercely authentic. The softness of thread becomes a stage for disarming truths, where childlike wonder coexists with cultural critique.

Her practice extends the feminist reclamation of craft pioneered by artists such as Miriam Schapiro, Louise Bourgeois, and Judy Chicago, while evoking surrealism’s embrace of dream and the irrational. Subtle yet insistent, her embroidered tableaux lean into the feminine as a site of sensitivity, wit, and resilience.

Cogan reimagines embroidery not as ornament but as language which is intimate, poetic, and profoundly contemporary.