Pinchas Cohen Gan (b Meknès, Morocco, 1942). Israeli painter and mixed-media artist of Moroccan birth.
He immigrated to Israel in 1949 and studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem (graduating in 1971) and the Central School of Art in London before receiving a BA degree in Social Science and History of Art at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1973).
His mixed-media works of the 1970s conveyed his sense of physical dislocation at being estranged as a Moroccan refugee in Israel; the human figure appeared as an essential element of this theme of displacement and homelessness.
In 1975 he returned to drawing and painting in works such as Analogical Work on Computers (1977; Tel Aviv Mus. A.), in which faceless, generalized figures function as symbols in a non-specific space.
From 1975 to 1977 Cohen Gan lived in New York, where he studied at Columbia University (MFA, 1977), before settling in Tel Aviv, where he combined scientific systems with introspective autobiographical references in narrative paintings such as the series Formula and Painting Confrontations (1982; Tel Aviv Mus. A.); in these works form and color, depth and flatness are interwoven as a means of binding together the figures.
Currently lives in Tel Aviv.
Prizes:
1978 America-Israel Cultural Foundation; Isaac Stern Creativity Prize; 1979 Sandberg Prize, Israel Museum, Jerusalem; 1991 Eugene Kolb Prize for Israeli Graphics; 1991 Minister of Education Prize; 1999 Acquisition Prize, Tel Aviv Museum. 2005 Prize for Life's Work in Plastic Art, Ministry of Education; 2005 Dizengoff Prize.
