Yair Garbuz

born 1945, Giv'atayim, Israel

Artist Name: Yair Garbuz

Title: "Eastern Appearance", 1970s

Signature Description: Signed in Hebrew and English lower left

Technique: Mixed media and collage on paper

Image Size: 70 x 100 cm / 27.56" x 39.37" inch

Frame: The painting is matted and framed

Condition: Very good condition.

Artist's Biography:

Yair Garbuz, Israeli, multimedia artist, author and filmmaker, born Giv'atayim, Israel, 1945.
Lives and works in Ramat Gan, Israel.

In 1962-1967, after serving in the Israel Defense Forces and while a member of Kibbutz Kfar HaHoresh, he studied painting at the Avni Institute and took private lessons with Israeli artist Raffi Lavie.
He was active in the +10 group.
He began to exhibit in 1967, participating in group and individual exhibitions in Israel and abroad.
Garbuz also taught from 1973 at the Hamidrashah School of Art, serving as its director from 1997, at the Avni Institution, Tel Hai College, and the Bezalel Art Academy.
In 1974-1986, he created video art using techniques similar to collage, and wrote texts in the same style.
In 1983-2004, he was editor and one of the authors of a newspaper column, Davar Akher.
In 1993, he hosted a satiric television show, "Ein im me ledaber" (No one to talk to), and wrote scripts for a current events program, Tik Tikshoret.

Garbuz's early work, in the 1960s, combined photographic collage and scribbles to create expressive figurative portraits and grotesque nudes.
From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, he made ironic use of characters from Zionist propaganda and incorporated texts in his compositions.
Later, he returned to more traditional painting and created collages referencing the history of Israeli art.

In his art, Garbuz moved from abstraction to the use of collages incorporating photographs, texts, and various materials, all serving to produce personal and social/cultural narratives.

Yair Garbuz is a one-man cultural enterprise. His oeuvre is so prolific, diversified, and influential that it cannot be encapsulated in the scope of a short text. As well as a leading artist and teacher, Garbuz is also a writer and a journalist, among the pioneers of Israeli video art (If Not a Giant then at Least in His Garden, 1979), and a well-known public figure.
He was among Raffi Lavie's most outstanding students, and has taken Israeli painting's penchant for the use of language, puns, and jokes to the extreme. Whether collages, assemblages, or paintings with a collagist inner logic, his paintings introduce some of the boldest attempts at reflexivity in Israeli art. Garbuz conducts an ongoing dialogue with the history of Israeli painting, employing verbal jokes and plays on words, which offer him, as Freud taught us, a window to the historical unconscious of our civilization.

His painting has been described as "adept in the poetics of loneliness, constantly lighting fires that signal from one mountaintop to the next an ironic wish to belong.

His third solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2015 (1973, 1983) following the Rappaport Prize for an Established Israeli Artist featured works from the years 2010-2015. Once again, his paintings turn out to be a comical, at times grotesque theatrical show, maybe even a circus or a carnival. Their humor is twofold: both visual and linguistic. More than ever, these new paintings displayed the artist's virtuosity and his ease with the Hebrew language and painting styles alike.

Yair Garbuz: Prize for an Established Israeli Artist, 2015

Prof. Yair Garbuz describes himself as someone “who is compelled to be a painter.” Although his work is spread across different disciplines - art, theater, writing, teaching - his starting point is painting. Over the years Garbuz has developed a unique painting language, which is a cross between American pop art and local painting. His collage works look like a “boxing ring” between opposing artistic styles and conflicting thoughts: Paris and New York, abstract lyricism versus conceptual painting, Eastern and Western elements, socio-political art alongside a personal creation. The figure of the artist emerges occasionally from the painting: as an observer, a guide, as a prophet or the village idiot, who conveys his story through different voices and changing identities.

Many images are compressed painting, seemingly without censoring or editing: the exposure of racism from within and without, war, whims and desires. All of these are presented in the guise of quotations from illustrations, old propaganda publications or copies of paintings by Israeli artists who have been excluded or idealized. Thus, in a unique way, Garbuz's work becomes an epic and historical creation, reflecting the split identity of Israeli society, living in constant conflict between the desire to remember and the urge to erase and forget. He held his first solo exhibition in 1967, and since then has had dozens of solo exhibitions in galleries and museums and participated in numerous group exhibitions in Israel and abroad. His paintings can be found in museum collections in Israel and in many private collections.

Education
1962-1967 Avni Institute, Tel Aviv (with artists Raffi Lavie, Moshe Propes and Yehiel Krize)
Painting, Beit Zvi, Ramat Gan, with Rina Balhotovsky

Teaching

1962-1967 Avni Institute, Tel Aviv
Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design, Jerusalem
Tel-Hai College.
1973-1997 Midrasha LeOmanut, Beit Berl School of Arts
1997 - 2011 Director of art school at Beit Berl Teachers Training College.

Together with his work in painting he worked in two other areas. Cinematography where he made films that were shown with films by other painters to the public. For example, the films ‘'Lists” and “12.5.75".
In addition, he published two stencils of "Story Art” His work continues to be linking of texts and pictures to create a visual story combined with painting.
At present he is an art teacher at the Seminary for Art Teachers Hertzliya.

Awards and Prizes

1982 Biennale Prize, Museum of Modern Art, Haifa
1983 America-Israel Cultural Foundation grant for studies in the US
1989 Grant for an Artist-in-Residence at the Cité, Paris, The Council for Culture and Art
1990 Minister of Education Prize for a Young Artist
1991 Gerard Levy Prize for Photography, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
1992 The Mendel and Eva Pundik Foundation Prize for an Israeli Artist, Tel Aviv Museum of Art
1994 Sokolov Prize for Journalism
1999 The Israel Discount Bank Prize for an Israeli Artist, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
2000 The Minister of Culture Prize        
          Discount Bank Prize for Contemporary Art,, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
2001 Kugel Prize for literature, awarded by the Municipality of Holon
2004 EMET Prize for Science, Art and Culture, Prime Minister's Office
2015 The Rappaport Prize for an Established Israeli Painter, Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

1967  Massada Gallery, Tel Aviv

1974  "Yair Garbuz: Paintings, Drawing", The Tel Aviv Museum

1975  "Didactic Art: New Works", Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv

1977  "New Works", Sara Gilat Gallery, Jerusalem

          "Selected Works on Paper", Debel Gallery, Jerusalem

1978  "Hebrew Family Manuscripts", Hamidrasha School of Art, Ramat Hasharon; Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv

1979  "If Not a Giant, Then at Least in His Garden", Hakibbutz Gallery, Tel Aviv

1980  "Early Works", Tzavta Gallery, Tel Aviv

          "If Not a Giant, Then at Least in His Garden", reconstructed  exhibition, Dizengoff Center, Tel Aviv

          "The Evenings (Arabs) Pass By Quietly", Shenar Gallery, Tel Aviv

1981  "Exhibition Toward the Publication of the Book Ready Story Art", Sara Levi Gallery, Tel Aviv

          "They Shut Down the Youth Centers and Went to Make War", Sara Gilat Gallery, Jerusalem

1986  "Yair Garbuz Presents a Jew, Frenchman and Arab: New Works", The Tel Aviv Museum

1988  "Paris – Tiberias", Bograshov Gallery, Tel Aviv

1989  The Gallery in Kibbutz Beeri

1990  "Yair Garbuz: Paintings", The Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan

1991  Beit Uri and Rami Nehushtan Museum, Kibbutz Ashdot Yaacov Meuchad 

          "New Works", The Gallery in Kibbutz Urim

1993 "New Paintings", The Open Museum, Industrial Park, Tefen

         "Buckets Shed Light on Streams and Aching Hands Change Their Mind", Givon Art Gallery, Tel Aviv

          Reconstruction of two exhibitions: "If Not a Giant, Then at Least in His Garden" and "Didactic Art",    Bograshov Gallery, Tel Aviv

         "In the Forest", The Study Gallery of the Art Department, University of Haifa

1995  "Yair Garbuz", Givon Art Gallery, Tel Aviv

1996  "Léger, Gauguin, Jews, and Scraps", The Municipal Gallery, Kfar Saba

1998  "Works on Paper", The Other Gallery, Talpiot College of Education, Tel Aviv

          "From the Series: Sad as Songs", The Municipal Gallery, Rehovot

2000 "Laugh Guernica! Laugh!: Erich Kästner and the Third World", Givon Art Gallery, Tel Aviv

         "Yair Garbuz / Yehiel Krize – Two-Person Exhibition", The Art Institute Gallery, Oranim Academic College

          "It Said: Danger of Illustration, and Should Have Read: Horror", The Yavneh Art Workshop

2001 "Europe Will Not Teach Us…", Givon Art Gallery, Tel Aviv

          "Youth and Fire", Florescent Gallery, Tel Aviv

2003  "Carrying the Dead on Our Shoulders: East-European Elements in Yair Garbuz's Work", 

           The Artists House, Tel Aviv

2004  "From Afar You Shall See: Selected Paintings", Forty Years of Work, Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv

2005  "Restoration" and "What Does the Painter Care", Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv

          "Garbuz and Dorchin, The Joint Exhibition", The Art Gallery, University of Haifa (cat.)

          "Yair Garbuz - Presents Restoration", Beit Gabriel on the see of Galilee (Cat.)

2006  "A Life of Rattle", the Open Museum, Industrial Park, Tefen and Omer

2008  "I Wrote a New Painting", Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv

2010  "Before and After Ready Meidale", Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv

2011  "Selected Works from the Gallery Collection" on the occasion of launching the book "Yair Garbuz: Ready Meidale", Published by Hamidrasha

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