Cohen travelled to New Mexico for the first time in 1969, where he was excited both by the landscape and by Native American ritual dances. Concerned with process in his art, he is primarily known as an abstract painter, whose complex non-figurative forms have allowed him to express his responses to the world in rich and imaginative terms. His early work contrasted rigid, symmetrical shapes with loosely painted forms floating over, around or beneath them. From the mid-1970s, partly influenced by Abstract Expressionism, his works attempted to relate the process of painting to a range of social and religious rituals inspired both by his traditional Jewish upbringing and by the experiences from his travels. He has also produced an extensive body of prints, which currently employ densely layered, dazzling geometric patterns and motifs.