| Raffi Lavie | |
|---|---|
Photograph of Raffi Lavie (2003) |
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| Born | 1937 Tel Aviv Mandate Palestine |
| Died | May 7, 2007 Tel Aviv, Israel |
| Nationality | Israeli, Jewish |
| Field | Painting |
Raffi Lavie (Hebrew: רפי לביא; 1937 - May 7, 2007) was an Israeli artist, art educator and music/art critic.
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Lavi was born in Tel Aviv, Mandate Palestine. He began teaching at the Midrasha Art Academy in 1966. In the same year he was also a founder of the group Ten Plus. Lavie's work is a cross between graffiti and abstract expressionism. He influenced a generation of young artists. In the early 1960s, Raffi Lavie began to paint in spontaneous scrawls, which soon began to echo graffiti and comic strip art. He wrote on his paintings as if they were walls covered with scribbles. Nurtured by Aviva Uri and Arie Aroch, his work is angry, nervous, aggressive, and abrasive. He was invited to exhibit with "New Horizons", but his work had already, at the beginning of the 1960s, challenged the delicate lyricism of the group. Towards the end of the 1960s, Lavi] began to glue photographs, reproductions and posters on his works, combining varied aesthetic elements; kitsch, applied graphics, children's drawing, and political rhetoric. He transformed the banal into art and breathed art into the banal. Like Tumarkin and Lifshitz he scorned bourgeois prototypes of beauty, and sought to restore the image to art after its banishment by "New Horizons". The synthesis of scribbled line and collage is unique to Lavie's work. It has been compared to the work of American artist Cy Twombly. He retired at the age of 62. In 2002, a retrospective exhibit of his work was held at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. In 2005, he had a solo exhibition at Givon Gallery in Tel Aviv.[1]
Due to severe back problems, Lavie painted in his last years while sitting. On May 7, 2007, he died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Tel Aviv, aged 70. He donated his body to the University of Tel Aviv for research.[2]