Raffi Lavie , 1937-2007
Untitled, 1967

Untitled, 1967
Mixed media on paper, 50X70 cm, Signed and dated

About The Artist:
born 1937, Israel. 1966 A founder of the group ''Ten Plus''. 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, Lavie 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.