Simon Gaon

Simon Gaon (born in New York 1943) is an American painter, expressionist and action painter. He is best known for his intense, tempestuous, action oriented paintings of the cityscape. He was also a co-founder of the Street Painters, a group of eight New York artists who painted directly from the city life they observed on the streets of America's largest city.
Simon Gaon is most famous for his Time square series (1998) displaying the chaos and confusion of city. His depictions of the locale have been called dizzying, disorienting, and even mind-boggling. His works manifest the vitality, wildness, drivenness, and hysterical quality of the urban setting, ever expanding to the point of explosion. Gaon's chaotic Time Square helps him, as an artist, to express the contradictory life forces that live within him. Simon Gaon also focuses on those who live in the urban periphery, the street people, immigrants and prostitutes. His paintings go beyond the immediate perception of these subjects, to uncover the inherent contradictions both in his subjects psyche and social position, and in his own consciousness. His subjects display a noble and prophetic character, as if spiritually from a bygone era yet awkwardly entrenched in a harsh contemporary reality.