Ya'ir Garbuz Remembered as a Defining, Restless Voice in Israeli Art

Ya'ir Garbuz, who was born in 1945 and died in 2026, was still filling a sketchbook with drawings only days before his death. At his funeral, his wife Margalit held that notebook while eulogizing him, and the article uses those final pages to sum up his lifelong method, dismantling, disrupting, and rebuilding images and words with irony and wit.

The piece says Garbuz spent about six decades shaping Israeli culture as a painter, writer, journalist, satirist, publicist, art teacher, lecturer, and devoted family man. He was widely exhibited in major museums, led the Mederasha art school for years, served on professional committees, and won important prizes. He was also popular with broad audiences through books such as "BeDerekh la-Kolnoa," "Tamid Polani," "Pariz Tel-Aviv," and "Oyi Artzi," as well as through satirical newspaper columns and television panels with figures including Dani Kerman, Shlomo Nitzan, Haim Be'er, Ephraim Sidon, and Dudu Geva.

Garboz, the article notes, did not keep distance from the art world. He regularly visited exhibitions in jeans and sandals, wrote about other artists, and gave many talks and lectures across the country, helping bridge the Israeli periphery and the center. The writer recalls first encountering him at a lecture in Ashdod in the late 1980s, describing him as someone who sharpened critical thinking and openly questioned local artistic myths, including bourgeois culture, kibbutz ideals, modernism, and the avant-garde.

Born in Givatayim, he dreamed of becoming a painter from childhood and studied with Rafi Lavie, forming a long-term artistic dialogue that connected him to Henry Shelzniak and Yaakov Dorchin. His art mixed grotesque figures, quotations from art history, collage-like images, Paris facades, burning wooden-town houses, and photographs of old kibbutz scenes. In April 2024, the writer invited him to show a new series, "Heads and Painting Inside Them," at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, his last museum exhibition. Garbuz then selected works by Auschwitz survivor and artist Oziash Hoffstätter to appear alongside his own, underscoring his concern with canon, memory, and who is left out of Israeli art history. The article closes by framing his late work through Theodor Adorno's idea of "late style," and says goodbye to him as both an artist and a person.