Pinchas Cohen Gan (Hebrew: פנחס כהן גן; born November 3, 1942) is a Moroccan painter and mixed-media artist.

His father, Moshe HaCohen, was a painter who left his art to support his family as a merchant; and his mother, Rivka Gan, worked as a French teacher.

[1] In 1949 he made Aliyah to Israel with his parents and four brothers on the ship “Kedma,” and he grew up in Kiryat Bialik, in a neighborhood of German immigrants.

The subjects included images of buildings or human beings, to some of whom Cohen Gan added colored strings that he glued to the paper.

Within the plastic sleeves Cohen Gan raised fish, as a symbol of cultural isolation and in an attempt to integrate essential principles into the landscape.

[9] At the same time Cohen Gan declared that he was not interested in concentrating on the graphic quality of works of art, but rather on an attempt to decrease the distance between the idea and its visual expression.

Adam Baruch remarked about the exhibition that Cohen Gan was trying to create a human “idea picture.”[12] A common motif in these works is the conflict between “art” and “science.” This conflict signified what Cohen Gan called “the theory of relative art” – an epistemology within the framework of the laws of artistic creativity perceived as a system of dynamic attributions of culture and the varying laws of nature.

[14] The formulas were an expression of philosophical-esthetic texts, in which Cohen Gan divided artistic activity into units and the connections between them, and presented them as a linguistic-mathematical system.

In other works of this period, such as “The Other Science in Gray” (1982) or “Israeli Paradigm of the Prodigal Son No.1” (1982), a large number of images appear.

In this installation Cohen Gan built sophisticated geometric bodies in wooden frames covered in painted canvas that comprised an attempt to examine the conventions of Euclidean geometry as an expression of his occupation with the epistemology of art.

At the time Cohen Gan was living in Paris, where he had been given a studio for half a year in “la Cite” artists’ quarter.

[21] In addition to his work as an artist, during these years Cohen Gan continued to write articles on esthetics in which he also included various biographical treatments.