Pinchas Cohen Gan (b. 1942, Meknes, Morocco) is a Moroccan-Israeli artist whose multidisciplinary practice has played a significant role in the development of Israeli conceptual and contemporary art. Working across painting, drawing, printmaking, installation, performance and writing, Cohen Gan has spent more than five decades investigating questions of identity, displacement, cultural belonging and the relationship between the individual and systems of knowledge.
Born into an observant Jewish family in Meknes, Cohen Gan immigrated to Israel with his family in 1949 and grew up in Kiryat Bialik. His experience as a North African Jewish immigrant in the young State of Israel—and the sense of cultural alienation he later associated with it—became an important conceptual foundation for his artistic practice.
Cohen Gan studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and later at Columbia University in New York. Emerging in the early 1970s, he became known for experimental actions that moved beyond the conventional boundaries of the art object. Projects such as The Dead Sea Project (1972–73), Touching the Border (1974), and his activities in refugee camps near Jericho used geography, demographic information and the human body to explore borders, migration, isolation and belonging.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cohen Gan began returning to painting while retaining the intellectual framework of conceptual art. Human figures, floating heads, mathematical formulas, diagrams and fragments of text became recurring elements of a distinctive visual language through which he examined the tension between art and science, body and mind, East and West, and personal experience and collective history.
Throughout his career, Cohen Gan has also addressed Jewish history, memory and the Holocaust, while developing an extensive body of theoretical writing on aesthetics and the structures of artistic creation.
His work has been presented extensively in Israel and internationally and is held in major institutional collections. Among his numerous distinctions are the Sandberg Prize for Israeli Art (1979), the Dizengoff Prize for Painting and Sculpture (1995), the Ministry of Culture and Sport Lifetime Achievement Award (2005), and the Israel Prize in Painting (2008).
Today, Cohen Gan is regarded as a central figure in Israeli art, recognized for a practice that brings together conceptual rigor, personal history and an enduring investigation into the human condition.