Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Pinchas Cohen Gan
Israeli (b.Morocco, 1942)
CORRELATED COLOR CONSTRUCTION (1978)
painted wood
10 elements, each 18" x 24"

STYLE: TOTAL ART

  

Pinchas Cohen Gan emigrated to Israel in 1949. He studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem and Columbia University, where he worked with Meyer Schapiro. His first one-man show was held in 1972 in a cow shed on a kibbutz. Cohen created performance-based installations throughout the seventies. More recently, he has focused on painting and continues to have gallery and museum exhibitions in the United States and Israel.

Cohen always works in series, believing that the sole piece of art is merely the fragment of the whole. Cohen Gan's works, though seemingly made up of simple figures and symbols, use semiotic sign systems referencing cultural, religious, scientific, and philosophical subjects. This series is based on Cohen Gan's theory of Figure, Form, Formula, in which universal visual expressions are arranged in changing hierarchies.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Pinchas Cohen Gan, Dictionary of Semantic Painting and Sculpture, 1991
"The artist is seen as an agent of pictorial systems moving, as in art, like a pendulum within the sphere of culture and society in general.The Dictionary seeks to establish a connection with mankind and in culture, and to reinforce the iron rule that the importance of one man's art is of no value."
Gil Goldfine, Jerusalem Post, 3/2/02
"Pinchas Cohen Gan is a master of the visual conundrum, as he proves once again in File Name: The Ideal and the Barbaric Iconographical Background: the continuous pain of looking for a home (flat), an absorbing series organized around his "Everyman" pictogram, in which encrusted black backgrounds, over-painted with colorful shapes, are set above laser printed diagrams.
In every exhibition dealing with Israeli art, whether devoted to easel painting, sculpture, or conceptual installations, nagging social and political issues are bound to be addressed."